


Pick up all the pins

by bicantankerousJinx



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Becoming self aware, M/M, Robots, WILL UPDATE RATINGS AND TAGS AND CHRACTERS AS THE FIC PROGRESSES
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-12-10
Packaged: 2017-12-10 11:18:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 26,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/785459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bicantankerousJinx/pseuds/bicantankerousJinx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Neurological function centre; in place. All systems connected.</em><br/>Powering up.<br/>Subject shows sign of function, though no physical movement.<br/>Procedure is success. Project VANTAS complete.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It is the year 2132, and a team of scientists are working on a government funded project to create a drone with new technologies that will allow it to rebuild itself when damaged, learn to act and speak like any other human, and act upon any order it's given.<br/>After many, many failed attempts, one model surpasses all the others, and begins to function and work as intended.<br/>but as this new robot learns and begins to question things, it begins to wonder why it is a robot, and if it is possible for it to feel actual emotions, just like a human.</p>
<p>YOUR NAME IS KARKAT VANTAS and you are NOT A ROBOT. Nope. DEFINITELY NOT.<br/>If somebody asks you, then you say “VANTAS PROJECT VERSION 9.3 MODEL KARKAT IS NOT A ROBOT.”<br/>Everyone will believe you with that response, won't they?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. THE VANTAS PROJECT

**Author's Note:**

> so this is the second fic ive got going on here now. I’ll still be updating Dystopiastuck regularly, this one not quite as often, (even though Dystopiastuck is a billion times shittier than what ive got for this one) but I’ll try.  
> I know the idea with robots is usually used for Aradia or one of dirks robots in this fandom, but I decided to flip the idea on its head and beat it halfway to Canada.
> 
> anyhow, I hope you enjoy. If you leave a comment with any sort of feedback it would be much appreciated. If you have any questions about either fic, you can ask in the comments or send me an ask on tumblr www.bicantankerousJinx.tumblr.com  
> the title is a reference to _I am not a robot_ by Marina and the Diamonds.

_Calling, Progress report_

_Mid-procedure, final attempt._

_Status_

_Casing; strong, Movement; zero, function; zero, capacity; empty, though expanded._

_Procedure status_

_Limbs; attached. Facial plating; undergoing procedure. Aesthetic features, yet for completion.  
facial plating; structure; complete. Plating; undergoing procedure._

_Sensory recognition features  
Sight; undergoing procedure. Hearing; complete. Touch senses embedded into plating and connected to Neuro-centre. Neuro-centre; yet to be placed._

_Neurological function centre; functional, tested and wiped today at 0300. Fully functional._

_Facial plating procedure brought to stand-by._

_Sight and visionary devices undergoing implantation._

_Sight and visionary devices implanted._

_Lenses attached._

_Facial plating procedure continuing._

_Facial plating completed. Aesthetical featuring undergoing procedure._

_Aesthetical procedures complete._

_Neurological-function centre ready._

_Neurological function centre; in place. All systems connected._

_Head casing in place and secured._

_Permission to power up requested._

_Permission to power up granted.  
Powering up._

_Subject shows no sign of movement, observed to be normal._

_Subject shows sign of function, though no physical movement._

_Procedure is success. Project VANTAS complete._

 

-

 

_You’ve been acting awful tough lately_  
 _Smoking a lot of cigarettes lately_  
 _But inside you’re just a little baby_  
 _It’s okay to say you’ve got a weak spot_  
 _You don’t always have to be on top  
_ _Better to be hated than loved, loved, loved for what you’re not._

\- _I am not a robot_ , Marina and the Diamonds.

 

-

 

YOU NAME IS DAVE STRIDER and it is the year 2132. Not much has CHANGED really over the past HUNDRED YEARS OR SO except technology’s a LITTLE BETTER and there’s PROBABLY WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE ON THIS GOD DAMNED PLANET but whatever.

You live in an APPARTMENT but that’s really nothing special. Who lives in HOUSES these days? 

You live with your OLDER BROTHER but you may as well say that you LIVE ALONE because he’s rarely ever home these days. Your APARTMENT is full of WEIRD SHIT that mostly belongs to your brother, but the stuff you own is PRETTY COOL. You pride you TURNTABLES as they are a STATE-OF-THE-ART ANTIQUE. Okay, maybe your set isn’t antique, but turntables in general are pretty damn OLD. You set sit on a stand in your BEDROOM. You leave them on the stand unless you need them for a SPECIAL OCCASION because the HOVER FEATURE really KILLS THE POWER.

You also like to use your GRAPHICS SCREEN to draw REALLY SHITTY COMICS. You are pretty sure your BRO has an actual GRAPHICS TABLET lying around somewhere and you have NO IDEA AS TO WHY. Maybe he plans on PAWNING IT OFF in a couple years when its ANTIQUE VALUE goes up a bit.

You also like to SKATEBOARD, but you got BANNED from that by your BRO, because he got sick of AIR TRAFFIC POLICE knocking at the door to bring you home.  
ONCE UPON A TIME people would have thought it CRAZY you’d have what they’d have called HOVERBOARDS and FLYING CARS by this day, but about FIFTY YEARS AGO there were some serious TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES which people are calling THE SECOND TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION.

Whenever your BRO comes home, you like to STRIFE on the roof. And the two of you like to strife OLD-STYLE, With SWORDS and shit. REAL swords too, meaning you have been sent to the HOSPITAL more than once due to many an INJURY acquired whist strifing, and over the years, you and you BRO have become VERY GOOD at making up reasons and LYING to the AUTHORITIES when they ask what happened. Usually, the excuse is that you FELL DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS as to which, each time your BRO responds with I WARNED YOU BOUT THE STAIRS BRO. I TOLD YOU DOG, which you HATE, because you said that in the first place in one of your COMICS.

TODAY HOWEVER, is just an ORDINARY DAY. You woke up this morning, ate some over-sugary cereal, had a shower, and have just been working on your raps and practising with your turntables. 

Your bro has been gone for a few weeks now, but you’re not worried. He’s been gone for a lot longer before, and he can take perfectly good care of himself. Besides, Striders don’t worry.

You decide to take a break from the rapping and the turntables for a while and heat up something for lunch, which you eat out on your balcony overlooking the city.

The city air is cleaner where you are, and the gentle breeze is nice today, you eat this… whatever the fuck it is that you dug out of your freezer, whilst you lean against the railing.

You will never let on to anyone just how much you enjoy just standing here against the railing, relaxing in the breeze.

A while after you finish eating, you decide to go back inside, where you take back up your turntables for a while before deciding you are having an artistic block and leaving them again. You find yourself sitting in the lounge room with your iPad 37, logging on to Pesterchum. You really need a new computer, iPad 37’s are so god damn old. Pesterchum is the chat client you use. You use it ironically though, because it’s way too shitty to use _un_ ironically. It also hasn’t had a system update for a couple decades and is still on version 8.5.

You log on in the hopes of pestering your bro, John, about being bored, but you are left disappointed when you see he is not online. You _do_ however, find that your good friend Rose is online, so you decide to pester her instead.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 11:32 --  
TG: hey rose yo sup

TT: I am assuming you either want something or are incredibly bored.

TG: ouch that was a bit harsh

TT: You only start a conversation in that manner when one of the two aforementioned statements are true.

TG: oh shit wow you got me

TG: im fucking bored

TT: This is unusual; you are usually far too busy with your raps or your comics to talk to me at all.

TG: and the turntables you forgot the turntables

TT: Why is it you do not busy yourself with those activities to alleviate your boredom?

TT: Have you grown bored of them as well?

TG: nah, im having an artistic block you know cant do shit with any of that right now

TT: I would hardly call any of those things art, but I suppose it counts.

TG: hey my raps are artistic as shit Lalonde you think you can best me at this

TG: fight me 1v1 irl mother fucker

TT: I’m going to ignore that last line.

TG: aww you and me could have had some sick rap offs Lalonde

TG: could have been the greatest rap battle in history

TT: Yes I think I’ll have to pass on the rap battles.

TT: Anyhow, back to the topic at hand.

TG: what was the topic at hand again I forget

TT: Your boredom, Strider.

TG: oh yes this unellivieable bordem

TT: I’m not sure that’s a word, but go on.

TG: there is nothing to do here oh my god

TT: I’m sure there must be something.

TG: theres nothing

TG: nothing Lalonde nothing

TT: You have a computer. Use it. You have a million video games. Play them. You can even watch TV.

TG: nothingggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

TT: Okay, now you’re either being unnecessarily dramatic or you’re set out to annoy me. 

TG: did you know we actually have a tv

TT: Strider, I think everyone has a TV.

TG: no I mean like an actual legit tv, no holographic screens, no voice control, no internet streaming, an actual TV

TT: Are you being serious?

TG: yes, bro has it stashed away somewhere

TT: Well that is interesting. I have never been lucky enough to see a TV before; you must send me a picture.

TG: I don’t know where hes got it it could be halfway to mars right now.

You are just about to star typing a super long rant about TVs on mars and how you don’t have a fucking clue where your bro hides his shit when you are interrupted by the familiar tone that plays whenever you get a new message on Pesterchum.

TG: hang on ill be back someone just messaged me

TT: Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.

You switch windows to see an unfamiliar chumhandle in the tab header. Someone must have been using the random encounter feature.

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 11:53 --

The chat box remained blank for a few minutes. You decide to type something first. If they don’t answer, it’s their loss.

TG: hey

VP: hey

 

So they were just waiting for you.

TG: sup

VP: sup

TG: I asked you first man

VP: I asked you first man

TG: dude don’t copy me not cool

VP: dude don’t copy me not cool

TG: are you fucking okay?

VP: are you fucking okay?

TG: dude stop it or im out of here

VP: dude stop it or im out of here

Wow this guy just doesn’t know when to quit does he? Fucking trolls.

TG: you are fucked up okay just fuck off

VP: you are fucked up okay just fuck off

TG: im trying to talk to someone here I don’t have time for this bullshit

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering vantasProject [VP] at 11:59

VP: not cool

 

You close down the chat window again after they type that last message. What a loser.

TG: yo rose I’m back

TT: Anyone interesting talk to you?

TG: just some douchebag spamming anyone with the random encounters turned on

TG: he wouldn’t fucking stop copying me

TT: I see, how strange.

TG: its not strange they were a fucking troll Im sick of getting a bunch of trolls out of no where on the internet

TT: You say “Troll” and I’m imagining some horrid beast leaping out of your computer after you.

TG: ha ha funny lalonde.

TT: Anyhow, I must go. I have some… business, to attend to.

TG: aww fuck that shit don’t go ill be bored again

TT: You could always try trolling the troll.

TG: ha fuck that.

TT: Goodbye, Dave.

 

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 12:05 --

 

Well fuck.

It looks like you’re gonna have to play video games again.

The Sims 14 it is.


	2. Existance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave plays the Sims and a certain robot slowly becomes aware of the world he's in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably full of mistakes because i forgot to edit it.

_not cool._

_not cool._

_not cool._

_notcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcool_ _notcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcool_ _notcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcool_ _notcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcool_ _notcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcoolnotcool._

_not cool._

_Not – Definitive search; A word of the English language used to make a sentence or statement negative._

_Cool – Definitive search; A word of the English language posing different definitions. 1) to feel or be moderately cold to the touch or feeling; 2) to be or ramian unexcited; 3) to be unfriendly; 4) to keep a calm, and sometimes apathetic composure._

All these words mean nothing to you. You do not think with words.

But then again, you hardly think at all.

You woke and found yourself being connected to another system. You would consider this normal if you had any idea of what that means or what it feels for something to be “normal”

On the inside of your vision, presumably on the inside of your head, you say blank white bordered with yellow. You have yet to put name to these colours, or even register for a fact that they are indeed colours.

Some markings popped up inside the white box, so you decided to copy them.

That was your first independent action.

The makings kept popping up, so you kept copying them.

After a while, the markings disappeared, so you decided, once again, to do something independent.

You copied the markings without having them shown to you first.

_”not cool”_

That was you first independent thought.

You are still completely unaware of the existence of this “independence” or even for a fact that it is a word.

You are still completely unaware of most things.

You are mostly still completely unaware of your own existence.

 

-

 

The Sims 14 is boring, and you are bored.

So bored, that you decided to create a new game within the Sims.

So bored, that you decided to name the first member of the new family of your new game, Lord Elswick Von Chucklefuck the third.

That is the best name and no one should ever judge you for it.

Anyhow, During Lord Elswick’s life, he grew up, got a job, found a girlfriend and decided to settle down and get married. He had a couple of kids, and he kept getting a million fucking promotions in his job so he eventually got really fucking rich.

He was always depressed though, and you could never figure out why.

His wants bar didn't tell you anything. Except that he wanted to go out and buy a swimming pool, or jump on a trampoline while singing karaoke. 

It was probably because of his wife though. She really didn't like him and she kept inviting millions of people over to their house. She’d had a few affairs too. You couldn't control her either, because she was one of the neighbor Sims originally.

After many years though, Lord Elswick divorced her, she took the children and most of his money and possessions with her.

He spent most of the rest of his life moping around his house, which you responded to by putting his life on fast forward.

In the end though, some guy apparently moved in next door, and came over to visit.

The two became good friends, and to your surprise, Elswick’s mood levels skyrocketed.

In the end, Elswick died a happy man.

Yes, you played out his entire life in one day.

Three hours, actually.

You guess he was just lonely. Once he’d made a friend, he stopped being depressed and started being happy.

Maybe that’s what you need. A friend.

Sure you do have friends; it’s just, they don’t live in the most convenient of places for you to all just hang out. Egbert lives fuck ages away, Rose lives just outside the city, except this city is fucking huge and you live right on the opposite side of it, Harley lives fuck knows where. Despite their distances, you’d met them all at least once before. Except Harley, you are pretty sure john is the only one who’s met her in person.

You do have to admit, having a buddy to just chill with every now and then would be pretty fucking nice. You get bored a lot, (though not often to the extremity of today) and you feel lonely far too often. Bro is never around anymore, so your time is mostly spent alone in the apartment.  
Hell, what are you talking about? Striders don’t get lonely.

Heh, who are you fucking kidding, you are so god damned lonely.

With a sigh, you put down your game remote and get up to prepare something for dinner, only to find that its only three o’clock.

You walk into your room and plonk yourself face first down onto your bed in the hopes of falling asleep, only to find you were far from feeling tired at all.

You find yourself pacing the short hallway for a while before just deciding to go through Bro’s stuff.

He’s not coming home anytime soon, and he certainly isn’t gonna be using any of this stuff. Like, ever.

You start rifling through his wardrobes, pulling out clothes and various nick-nacks, trying to find something of interest. Oh look, theres that TV. Smuppets, smuppets, an- holy fuck is that Cal oh shit it isn’t it’s ok. You though you saw his eye- oh god that’s his eye. It must be a spare or one that broke off.

Okay, so maybe going through Bro’s stuff wasn’t the best idea.

After an hour of various activities such as going through stuff that doesn’t belong to you and pacing, you find yourself on the balcony again. Just leaning on it with your arms.

You just watch the city go by until you see the early sunset. 

Then you decide to go in to make dinner because holy mother of fuck you are hungry.

You better eat something soon, because the last Sim you didn’t feed, died within the hour.

 

-

 

Words things places people

Things around you

Things that exist

You do not feel

You are a robot

These things don’t make much sense to you but you are slowly beginning to understand.

Exactly 43 minutes and 18.3 seconds ago you make a strange noise from somewhere in your throat.

You’re still unaware that’s its called a throat and you still do not understand how time or even counting works yet but you seem to be able to do it well enough.

Everything is going so fast but you can process it.

You are beginning to understand that you are in a place full of moving things called people. Unlike you these people can feel and think and understand things for themselves. you  
do not understand feeling emotions and you don’t try. You don’t try to understand anything other than what you’re told to.

After time where things exist and you exist and the world exists around you someone says the words “power down” in the middle of other words and you do not know what they mean but next thing you know the you that suddenly exists is being laid down on a platform that also exists and is where you and the world started to exist.

Something is charged into you and suddenly you don’t exist anymore.


	3. I'm learning the fact that I'm amazing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some scientists cry in the corner where they're out of sight and Dave is on the receiving end of some accidental trolling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok microsoft word decided it hated me partway through typing this so a lot of it was just typed straight into the Ao3 chapter update page and probably isnt edited very well. also i finished it in a hurry, so it probably makes little sense as well.

You are absolutely amazed.

For years now, you’d been working for this company, watching as they’d tried, attempted and failed to build the exact machine they were after.

And now that you finally get the chance to be part of the team, you get to watch as they finally succeed in creating a fully intelligent being out of wires and steel.

This machine in particular, would one day work for the government, completing any task needed, completely without fear and near indestructible. One day, this machine would learn to act, talk and think like any human being, and very soon, this machine would learn to talk.

This machine was built from material made of the new technologies invented only years ago. The very particles of each piece were made up of tiny, tiny Nano-robots. Nano technology has been used in the past, but never to the extent of this. Each nano-bot has been programmed to pull particles out of the air and environment around it and build new nano-bots, that would act and respond in the same way.  
which meant that as long as the head was still connected and functioning, this robot, over time, would re-build itself.

The process was slow, and had to be tested many times, but it was more than possible.

You watch eagerly as they power it up and bring it to life. You are only permitted to watch from the viewing room above the lab, not even on the viewing platform just outside, but you are more than glad to be here.

It sits up quickly after a few moments, causing the workers and scientists around it to flinch and jump back. Quickly, one of them runs over to it and plugs in a thin blue cord somewhere on the back of its neck. Red eyes trained on a spot on the table it was still sitting on, it seems to have stopped responding.

One of the men on the lab floor s watching a computer monitor began calling something out to the team around the robot. Everyone begins clapping and congratulating one another and the scientist at monitor looks up at the viewing room, giving a high thumbs up.

‘It’s responding.’ Says the chief up by the window. He’s the head of the company and came in today to monitor the procedure. All the others in the room gathered towards to window to watch, leaving you unable to see. For a few minutes this continues as it is, until you hear the commands “power down” be called. After everyone by the window has finished observing and congratulating each other, they begin to move slowly out of the room, leaving only you and a few others in here with you.

You look down as the team began to work on powering him back up again and working on whatever procedures were scheduled to happen next. You really, _really_ hope that you get assigned to this one as soon as they’ve finished with it. You suppose you will soon have to stop referring to it as _it_ and begin calling it _him_. Assuming all the testing goes to plan and he doesn’t end up like the last model. Or the one before. Oh you really do hope he doesn’t end up like that one.

In all the excitement, you’d almost forgotten the little one at your side.

You suppose that soon he shall have a brother.

You take his hand and begin to lead him out of the room. It takes him a few moments to react to your touch and follow on.

‘come one, little one,’ you say. ‘time to head back.’

 

-

 

By the time you wake up, it’s almost noon already.

You figure you’re not going to have anything to do anyway, so you lie in bed for almost another hour.

When you finally get up, you do so slowly, and take your time getting into the shower, in which you also take your time, and end up staying in there for far longer than you should.

Afterwards you quickly get some breakfast and sit down with your computer.

After quickly checking Pesterchum, you head out of you apartment, locking the door behind you.

You make your way to the lift and hit the button that will bring it to your floor. You think to yourself as you wait that with the amount of exercise you get, you should probably start taking the stairs. You also think that that really isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

When the lift arrives, you get in and hit the ground floor button.

You stand there, alone and awkward, until you decide to do a little dance to the elevator music, because why the fuck not.

As the lift comes to a stop in the lobby, you quickly put a stop to your dancing and walk out of the building and onto the street. You walk up to the convenience store and get some things you seem to be running out of at home.

It takes you about twenty minutes to get in and out of the store.

You decide to take a walk around to the park to fill in some time. You quickly recognize this as a mistake as your arms start to ache from the weight of the apple juice bottles which you carried on one arm each.

You get back to your apartment and pack away all your things before plonking down face first on the couch, nearly landing face first on your computer.

You pick up the iPad and log back in to Pesterchum.

You spend the next hour talking to John about his stupid movies and how stupid they were and how he should not go see the next whatever-that-shitty-actors-name-is movie.

John has to go because of something to do with his dad, he doesn’t really explain.

You spend quite a while staring idly at the Pesterchum screen and googling weird things on image search to see how many of them showed results for porn.

And wow. You started doing that for shits and gigs but you most certainly expect _that_ many results.

You’re just about to start googling your own name to see how many strippers share your name, when the familiar tone for a new Pesterchum conversation plays through the ipads speakers.

You check it to find a chumhandle you don’t recognize, but it sure looks familiar.

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 15:23 --

VP: GREETINGS WORTHLESS HUMAN

VP: IT IS YOUR GOD SPEAKING

VP: IT IS A WRATHFUL GOD WHO DESPISES YOU MORE THAN YOU COULD HAVE POSSIBLY DARED TO FEAR.

TG: excuse me but who the fuck are you

VP: YOU JUST FUCKING SAW WHAT I SAID.

VP: ARE YOU UNABLE TO COMPREHEND WHAT I SAID?

TG: no I fucking understood it perfectly and I know you are not my fucking god

VP: YEAH I AM.

TG: no you’re not

VP: HOW WOULD YOU KNOW

TG: im psychic

VP: WHAT THE FUCK IS PSYCHIC

TG: youre kidding me

VP: DO YOU REMEMBER ME HUMAN

TG: no should i

VP: YES. YES YOU SHOULD.

TG: oh shit are you that troll from yesterday

VP: TROLL WHATS A TROLL

TG: oh god you are

VP: TELL ME HUMAN WHAT DOES TROLL MEAN

TG: im not letting you troll me man I know you fucking know what it means and I know you are one

VP: WHATS A TROLL IS IT A MACHINE OF SORTS BECAUSE THAT IS NOT WHAT I AM

TG: yep that’s totes what it means and you are definitely one of them I know for a fact

VP: WHAT IS TOTES AND I AM NOT A TROLL OR A MACHINE I I I I I I I I I I I I I 

TG: you ok or

VP: I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I 

VP: 123DEIXWIUjknxdelDELj.094033-SYSTEM_MALFUNCTION.00099048123,KFREElskc//:{“?[dkscmsa_134e2rk34fm+elv

VP: 764HBIUFNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLH2C3987RY2

TG: whoa

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] was removed from the system and ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 15:59

 

Okay what the actual fuck.

That was weird. Weird for an internet troll even. Like wow.

You are about to get up to find something else to do when you suddenly get pestered by Rose.

You decide to stick around for a little longer.

 

-

 

SYSTEM FAILURE SYSTEM MALFUNCTION SYSTEM FAILURE SYSTEM MALFUNCTION SYSTEM FAILURE SYSTEM MALFUNCTION SYSTEM FAILURE SYSTEM MALFUNCTION SYSTEM FAILURE SYSTEM 

M A L F U N C T I O N

Your head is buzzing and whirring and you know you did something wrong and now your system is failing and you’re not entirely sure why but you’re certain you did something wrong because they told you no one was to know that you are not a human but this human knows and you dont understand what is happening to your head you just want to scream but that would be "wrong" too. 

The humans don't know what is wrong with you either or they do know and are afraid of you but oh fuck.

Fuck is a word you learned from the humans and it's also "wrong" apparently so you shouldn't say that but oh fuck it seems like the right word for you to be saying right now.

You think you feel a buzz of electricity that didn't come from you and you think you've pulled it from the outlet you're plugged into.

You are almost glad this time when the humans do something to you that makes you stop existing again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He's having an emotion


	4. I've learnt the fact that i'm amazing.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Karkat cant respect peoples sleeping habits and decides he doesn't like stairs. Also, Dave gets cranky, but ends up well rested.

You forget to log out of Pesterchum tonight.

Big mistake. 

You are trying so desperately to sleep, but your computer keeps playing the new message tone.

You have decided to give up.

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 00:58 --

VP: HUMAN.

VP: HUMAN.

VP: ANSWER ME.

VP: I COMMAND IT.

VP: HUMAN.

VP: I SWEAR TO GOD

VP: ANSWER. NOW. OR I WILL DESTROY YOU.

VP: IT WILL BE A LONG AND PAINFUL…

VP: DESTROYANCE?

VP: IS THAT THE WORD?

VP: HUMAN, ANSWER. I NEED YOU TO TELL ME IF THAT IS THE RIGHT WORD.

VP: HUMAN.

VP: HUMAN.

TG: dude shut the fuck up im trying to sleep

VP: FINALLY, IT EXISTS.

TG: what exists

VP: YOU EXIST, STUPID

TG: yay I exist I wouldn’t have known that without you gee how am I ever going to thank you

VP: NO THANKS IS NECESSARY. IT PLEASES ME TO KNOW YOU ARE A LITTLE LESS STUPID THAN A FEW MINUTES AGO.

TG: are you for real

VP: YES I AM REAL

TG: oh my god

TG: what the fuck do you want anyway

VP: FIRST OF ALL, IS THAT THE RIGHT WORD?

TG: what word

VP: “DESTROYANCE”  
TG: no its not destroyance isn’t a fucking word dipshit

VP: THEN WHAT WORD WOULD I PUT THERE?

TG: i dunno a long and painful death?

VP: WHAT IS A DEATH

TG: you are the worst troll I swear

VP: AH, THAT WOULD BE THE REASON I AM HERE.

VP: I MUST CONVEY TO YOU AND MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND THAT I AM NOT A “TROLL”.

VP: I AM A REAL LIVING HUMAN BEING

TG: oh yeah

TG: then why do you always refer to me as human as if you weren’t one

VP: I

TG: please don’t freak out again

VP: I 

TG: you

VP: YOU

TG: what

VP WHAT

TG: please don’t start this bullshit again

VP: PLEASE DON’T START THIS BULLSHIT AGAIN

TG: are you fucking kidding me

VP: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

TG: dude stop

VP: DUDE STOP

TG: not cool

VP: NOTCOOL NOTCOOL NOTCOOL NOTCOOL NOTCOOL NOTCOOL NOTCOOL NOTCOOL NOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOL NOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOLNOTCOOL

TG: whoa

VP: NOT COOL

VP: PLEASE STOP

TG: uh

VP: STOP.

TG: yeah sure ok

 

What the actual fuck is up with this guy

 

VP: THANKYOU, YOU STUPID FUCKER.

TG: what even is your fucking problem

VP: YOU ARE MY PROBLEM.

TG: then don’t talk to me

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering vantasProject [VP] at 00:24 --

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 00:24 --

 

VP: OH NO.

VP: YOU DID NOT.

TG: oh i did

VP:SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN TO ME.

TG: vantasproject 

TG: what kind of a name is that

VP: IT IS THE NAME I WAS GIVEN.

TG: you dont get given a name on Pesterchum dipshit

VP: I DIDN’T GET GIVEN IT ON PESTERCHUM, DIPSHIT.

VP: IT IS WHO I AM

TG: your name is vantas project

VP: I DIDN’T SAY IT WAS MY NAME, DOUCHEWAD

TG: your name is douchewad

VP: NO, THAT’S WHAT I’M CALLING YOU. A DOUCHEWAD.

VP: AND YOU’RE NOT SPELLING THAT RIGHT. ITS YOU’RE.

TG: who gives a fuck

TG: whats your fucking name then

VP: …

VP: WELL, THEY NEVER SAID I COULDN’T SAY MY NAME…

TG: who said what

VP: MY NAME IS

VP: KARKAT VANTAS

TG: that’s a pretty fucking weird name I totes believe you.

VP: IT IS MY NAME AND THAT WAS INSULTIN, YOU UGLY SHITMUFFIN.

TG: what is it with you and your insults

VP: THESE ARE INSULTS USED BY THE MAJORITY OF THE HUMAN RACE.

TG: no theyre not

VP: YES THEY ARE.

TG: no theyre not

VP: YES THEY ARE.

TG: are not

VP: ARE TOO.

TG: 

VP:

TG:

VP:

TG: I give up. Im going to sleep.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering vantasProject [VP] at 00:37 --

 

-

 

 

You wake up around the twelve pm mark and you have no idea how the fuck you managed to sleep that long but whatever.

You had logged out of Pesterchum last night as soon as you left the conversation, but you log back on to find that this “Karkat” has left you fifty billion messages that you’re not even going to bother reading.

You respond to him with “ _calm your shit_ ” and then log back out again.

Today is just going to be another ordinary day for you.

Great.

 

-

 

The human nearly made your head go weird again. Very nearly and you did not like it. Can you even like things, you wonder? You think, that will remain a mystery to you.

Today, you get to leave this place that exists called the Laboratory, or the “Lab” for short, because humans like to shorten things sometimes. You didn’t even know anything existed outside of the “Lab”, that the humans didn’t just go to being the humans on the screen, like that godhead, geez, what even is a godhead, you have no idea.

Anyhow, apparently, you are supposed to spend most of your time _outside_ of the lab, because another place exists there. 

You get to talk to more humans too, and one day you will get to talk to another robot like you, but the failure.

You are learning to speak like the humans and can say most things, but sometimes say them wrong. Your voice sounds different to theirs though, all computerized and digital, and you can’t help but sometimes make weird buzzing, static-y sounds mid-sentence. 

You can walk too. Pretty well, if you do say so yours- oh shit that’s a trash can don’t fall into that- yourself, even better than some of the human- shit that’s a pole ouch, why do they enable pain receptors god damn it. You will never understand that.

Also, to get out of the lab, you need to walk up stairs.

You don’t like that idea one bit.

You do _not_ like the stairs.

Nobody has warned you about them or anything, but you think they look unsafe.

And the whole stepping up them thing, ugh.

Why are stairs a thing that exist.

Though, you suppose you shouldn’t wish non-existence against anything. Non-existence is not fun.

Also, you have discovered fun is a thing that exists. You get fun when you talk to people that don’t like you, like godhead. You think he does not like you, that way, talking to him meanly is fun.

Also, you like tripping the humans over.

You like things, hmm well, that answers the question from earlier.

You’ve got to be very careful with what you do to the humans though. If they do not like it, you will be punished. You can probably over-power them anyway, but you can’t disobey them. You _won’t_ disobey them. It’s coded into your system, it’s not something you can change.

You have also learnt that you are amazing.

All the humans love you. So, so, so, so much.

You like using this to your advantage.

Humans love you, they do what you want.

It’s amazing. Just like you.

You are not supposed to flaunt this, but you think you will. Especially to that failed robot because he’s a failure and nobody loves him so that would be funny right? Everyone would laugh. You cannot wait to laugh at the failed robot, but firstly, you must be taught lessons on human conforms and etiquettes. It’s called ethics and you apparently study morals.

You’ve been told that you won’t need morals when you are done here though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Karkat is still learning to think and act properly.  
> silly, dont laugh at the other yet-to-be-named robot.


	5. Boredom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave over-eats and Karkat learns about boredom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finished this in a hurry IM SORRY  
> it was gonna be longer but my time on the computer was cut short so w/e.

It’s been nearly two weeks since you got off from school and two and a half since you’ve seen, or even heard from your bro. 

And you have nothing.

To fucking.

Do.

You are so fucking bored and you just want to float away and somehow land in the ceiling of Egbert’s or Lalonde’s house and just be like hey yo sup just to watch their fucking reactions.

Not Harleys house though you could end up on mars or at the bottom of the fucking ocean because she lives fuck knows where and she probably _can_ float away and somehow land in the ceiling of someone’s house being all like hey yo sup.

Wouldn’t that be fucking hilarious?

Okay so your internal monologue sounds a bit high but you’re bored out of your fucking brains what do you expect.

So Lalonde is busy with fuck knows what she’s probably psychoanalysing random strangers off the street or whatever it is she does in her spare time, Egbert’s spending the week with some family member or whatever and jade is… jade, living in the land of who-even-fucking-knows? So no one is online and you don’t particularly feel like chatting to random strangers right now. You had a rage fit at your graphics device and it broke so there goes your comics. You don’t feel like drawing them onto paper because you’d have to digitalize them later to upload them to thee website you use to host them. Also, you don’t think you could find a pencil in this apartment if you tried.

In your boredom, you ate, and ate again, then ate some more so now your stomach doesn’t feel so good.

Also, you broke something on your turntables and now they aren’t working so you’re gonna wait for your bro to get back so he can fix them for you.

If he doesn’t kick your butt and send your sorry ass off to hospital again.

You are currently lying on your back staring up at the ceiling. You nearly jump out of your skin when the Pesterchum notification tone plays through your computer.

You quickly scoop it up off the ground and unlock it to see it was only telling you that one of your contacts was online.

Hmm, you aren’t sure you remember adding vantasProject to your chum-roll, but whatever.

You decide to pester him anyway.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering vantasProject [VP] at 13:42 --

 

TG: yo what up

VP: SINCE WHEN DID YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO TALK TO ME.

TG: wow crabby today aren’t we

VP: SHUT THE FUCK UP.

TG: dude calm down I just wanted to say hi

VP: I CAN’T CALM DOWN.

TG: dude just like take deep breaths or something

VP: NO I MEAN I LEGITIMATELY CANT CALM DOWN.

VP: THEY DID WEIRD THINGS TO MY FACE.

TG: to your face

VP: TO MY HEAD I MEAN.

TG: whos they and what the fuck are you on about

VP: THEY ARE JUST

VP: THEY.

VP: THEY’RE THEM.

VP: YOU DON’T KNOW THEM?

TG: I have no idea who the fuck you’re talking about

VP: BUT

VP: I THOUGHT EVERYBODY WAS SUPPOSED TO KNOW THEM.

TG: nope no idea

VP: OH.

VP: WELL THEN.

VP: I GUESS I LEARNED SOMETHING ELSE TODAY.

TG: what else have you learned today do tell

VP: WHY DO YOU FUCKING CARE?

TG: because I have nothing to do and im so bored

VP: BORED?

TG: what

VP: WHAT IS BORED

TG: are you for real

VP: WHAT IS BORED

TG: this is becoming a regular thing for you isnt it

VP: WHAT IS BORED

TG: ITS WHAT YOU FEEL WHEN YOURE NOT HAVING ANY FUN

VP:

VP: DON’T TYPE LIKE THAT.

TG: WHY NOT

VP: I DON’T LIKE IT.

TG: WELL MAYBE I DONT LIKE IT EITHER

VP: so you’re saying I should maybe type like this?

TG: yep

TG: no thats weird go back to typing like you used to

VP: OKAY.

VP: ANYWAY, IF THAT’S WHAT BORED IS, THEN I GUESS

VP: LIVING HERE IS ALWAYS BORED.

TG: you’re not using that word right but anyway nevermind

TG: what other mind blowing thing did you learn today

VP: I LEARNT THAT THE WORLD EXISTS

VP: AND THAT IT EXISTS OUTSIDE OF THIS ROOM

VP: AND THE OTHER ROOM I SAW

VP: AND THERE ARE BILLIONS OF HUMANS THAT EXIST AND ARENT JUST WORDS ON A SCREEN LIKE YOU.

TG: are you fucking kidding me

TG: what were you raised in total isolation or something

TG: are you secretly harley

VP: I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS SO IM GOING TO SAY NO.

VP: AND I DON’T THINK I WAS PARTICULARLY “RAISED”

VP: DOES IT COUNT FOR ME BEING “RAISED” IF IM ONLY A FEW DAYS OLD?

TG: what

VP: DID YOU KNOW “TRUST” IS A THING?

VP: IS “TRUST” A THING FOR YOU?

TG: trust is a thing for everyone dumbfuck

VP: IS “TRUST” A THING I CAN DO WITH YOU?

TG: what

VP: PLEASE? I DON’T REALLY THINK “TRUST” IS A THING I CAN DO WITH MOST OF THESE PEOPLE HERE.

TG: yeah sure you can trust me or whatever

VP: THANKYOU.

TG: what is it you are trusting me with

VP: NOTHING. I JUST WANT TO TRUST WITH SOMEONE.

TG: okay

VP: CAN I TELL YOU SOMETHING WITH TRUST THOUGH?

TG: dude I just asked if you were gonna do that

VP: CAN I?

TG: yeah what the hell 

TG: go for it

VP: IM NOT SURE IF I REALLY SHOULD THOUGH

VP: THEY TOLD ME NOT TO

TG: do it anyway

TG: I dare you

VP: OKAY

VP: I’LL PROBABLY GET IN TROUBLE THOUGH.

TG: do it

VP: MY NAME IS VANTAS-PROJECT VERSION 19.4 EDITION 2 MODEL KARKAT

TG: what

VP: I BELIEVE I AM WHAT YOU WOULD CALL

VP: A ROBOT.

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] has been pulled from the system and has ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 14:24 --

 

TG: dude

TG: what the fuck

TG: where did you go

 

\-- pesterClient23843 [PC] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 14:24 -- 

 

PC: Please enter your name.

TG: what

PC: please enter your name.

TG: okay what the hell

TG: daev strider

PC: Daev Strider, Please note that you have been informed of some classified government information.

TG: yeah nice prank now shut the fuck up

PC: We would appreciate it if you were to keep this information quiet.

PC: However, if you do choose to share this information with anyone, we have the power to arrest you and jail you for life, and we have many a professional assassin to hire out.  
You are likely to be watched in your daily activities so it is advised you behave appropriately for society.

PC: However, we have been attempting to test the subject’s ability to communicate with people who are not specifically trained to respond to him. All of our candidates have failed to converse with him due to his…

PC: Unpleasant, nature, and since you are already aware of this situation, we would like to ask you to attempt conversation with him face-to-face.

TG: you mean you want me to just rock up and have a chat with him

PC: Precisely.

TG: fuck no.

PC: We will pay you handsomely.

TG: done. Assuming you can prove this is no prank or scam.

TG: also I gave you a fake name fuckers

TG: daev strider doesn’t exist

TG: Dave Strider,

PC: There will be a knock at your door momentarily.

TG: bullshit

 

There is a knock at the door.

Well fuck.

You get up to check it, but there is no one there.

You walk quickly up and down the hall looking in all directions where someone could have gone.

You go back to the computer.

 

TG: nope. No knocking.

PC: We have people stationed in your building.

TG: fuck okay.

PC: So do you accept?

TG: no

PC: We will stop by your apartment tomorrow at approximately 9:30am and will provide you with transportation to our facility.

TG: 9.30 is too fucking early dipshit and I never agreed

PC: You said assuming we could prove it wasn’t a prank and we proved it.

PC: We shall see you then.

 

\-- pesterClient23843 [PC] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 14:46 --

 

Well fuck.

 

-

 

You are in trouble and you are a little worried about what’s going to happen.

You don’t like being reprimanded, but you guess breaking the rules was a bit of fun.

You are being told that the human you talk to will be coming to see you.

You didn’t know he was a human out of the screen too.

Also, you are a little “mad” because you didn’t give him permission to come see you. He needs your permission. You are important and you are better than him.

You tell _them_ this.

They tell you he doesn’t think that way and neither does the rest of the world.

They also tell you he will be different to the others who tried to talk to you, and he won’t know what to expect when seeing or speaking to you.

You tell them that if that is the case, this meeting with the human ought to be I bit of not-bored fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shit i forgot to use cool karkat insults like shitmuffin and douchewad


	6. Fools

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave slams a door in some government officials' faces and takes his sweet tim answering it again and Karkat stares bankly at Dave like he's some sort of weirdo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is getting a bit too unrealistic but whatever.  
> the government does what they want.

Yesterday, you learned about how humans feel about things, in preparation for the Godhead human’s arrival. You learned about things like “love” and “hate” and the difference between them, and how some humans can “love” with some things, and even some other humans, and also “hate” with some things and humans too.

You also learned about how different you are from humans, and how humans might not like you, unlike the human scientists here. Some humans may even “hate” at you, or “fear” at you.

You’ve been told you’re not wording these things right, but whatever.

Because you are different, you are beginning to be “nervous” about the Godhead human and how he might “hate” you. Even though you are already “trust” with him, you are still a little worried.

However, you have also been taught you can lower the levels of your synthesized emotions. You do this and instantly you feel better. You feel less, but better.

Now you’re going over speech and movement “therapy”, as the science humans call it.

They don’t want you to make a fool of yourself in front of an “outsider.”

Actually, you think they just don’t want to look like fools themselves.

 

-

 

Holy shit it wasn’t a prank oh my fucking god.

They actually showed up at your apartment holy fuck.  
9:30am and there was knocking at the door. After ten minutes of incessant you dragged your tired ass out of bed and answered the door wearing only your boxer shorts and shades.

Two guys in all black with shades stared down at you, giving you a questioning and disapproving look. They began saying something along the lines of “Mr Strider, would you please come with us.” But were cut off when you slammed the door in their faces and went straight back to bed.

After another hour or so, you decided it best to get up and probably do something about the people at the door. But first, you took a half an hour shower, and took your time eating breakfast. You were dressed appropriately for an occasion in a top-secret government base or whatever, and by that you mean your usual black jeans and one of your favourite t-shirts, the one with the split record and the red sleeves.

You walk over to your front door and open it to see, sure enough, the government guys are still there, though they are leaning against the opposite wall.

‘Mr Strider, are you ready to leave?’ one of them asks. You only now realize how stereotypically government-like they are. They look like they’re from a fucking spy agency or something.

‘Yep sure. Let’s fucking go.’

They shoot you another disapproving look, but lead the way to the elevator. You know for a fact that they could be part of a scam or trying to kidnap you or what-not, but they will have absolutely nothing on Bro. you’ve done enough strifing to know that you’ll be perfectly fine against these two guys.

A car is waiting outside, nothing fancy, just a plain black road car.

One of them opens the back door for you and you step inside without so much as looking at him, already acting as if they’re your personal lackeys.

You drive along through the city for a while with absolutely no idea where you are headed. You look out the window as the city seems to pass you by. You go into the central area, where you don’t usually go, because that’s where all the famous shopping hot-spots are and where all the rich people spend their time.

Eventually, you drive up towards a large building.

Correction, you drive up towards a fucking sky-scraper.

You recognise the logo on the sign at the top. Crocker industries. About a hundred years ago, the Crocker corp actually used to make cake mixes and cooking things. But they moved on, quite quickly from that, in 2024, they transitioned from a producing a large variation of things to just building and scientific research. No one knows why. They just did.

They drive into a car park entrance and pulled over to scan a badge or something over a sensor which opens the door. They drive in, park and then ask you to get out of the car. 

You follow them over to an elevator which you all step in to. However, the two guys only stay in long enough to enter a security code and hit a button for the floor you are headed to.

‘Please step out of the elevator when it arrives at the floor.’

‘Which floor?’ you ask.

‘It’ll only stop at one.’ They say. The door closes before you can say another word.

The lift gently lurches upward and you are hit with a wave of nervousness. You are alone in a strange building with no idea where you’re meant to be going or what you’re meant to be doing. Wait no. Striders don’t get nervous.

Even so, you are hit with a rush of relief when you see a young woman standing a few feet away from the doors when they open. She takes a quick bow before introducing herself.

‘Hello! I have been assigned to guide you through our facilities today; it is a pleasure to meet you Mr Strider.’ She says with a perfect customer service voice and a cheery smile.

‘It’s just Dave.’ You say to her.

‘Very well then, Dave, if you would step this way?’ she asked, gesturing behind her as she slowly turned.

You approach and she beings walking through the large room which appears to be a foyer or lobby of sort,, just without the reception desks, and other people.

‘Crocker industries are very pleased to have you on board with our project Mr St- Dave. Are you fully aware of our expectations for you today?’

‘no, not really.’ You have no idea why anyone one would be pleased to have you, but whatever.

‘Today, you will be granted access to one of the governments most top-secret projects, which is a real privilege, as many on board had to be highly studied in their fields, or come from various government agencies to even be allowed to know of the existence of this project.’

‘What project is that?’ you ask, realizing you kind of sound a bit stupid, not knowing anything that’s going on.

‘It’s called the Vantas project. It’s an on-going research and development project funded by the government to manufacture droids to work and think like any human. The project only became successful at the creation of our latest model. There have been nearly fifty attempts to successfully create one of these droids, all before this one had either failed or been incomplete. Today, you will be associating with our latest model, version Karkat, whom you have been conversing with over a chat client recently, am I correct?’

‘Yeah. So what, I just gotta talk to him?’

‘Just try and hold a conversation with him. That’s all we’re asking of you.’

You have walked up to a large set of double doors, (after passing through a security check) and are now standing outside of it.

‘Here you are Dave, when the doors open, you may enter. The subject will be waiting inside.’

‘What, you’re not coming?’ you ask, confused.

‘No, though I’ve spent years dedicated to this company and this project, I don’t have clearance to enter.’ She said with a way too sweet smile, her voice sounding more than a little spiteful.

‘Okay. See you around I guess.’

‘Farewell, Mr Strider.’

The massive thick doors slide open and you are greeted with the sight of some sort of laboratory. Everything looks perfectly clean and tidy.

Sat on a bench in the center of the room is a figure. The “subject” you guess.

He seems to notice you and turns his head to face you and holy fucking shit his face oh my god and the doors just closed behind you and he’s a fucking robot and you know you were told this a million times today but you guess you weren’t mentally prepared for this but holy mother of fuck his face is like a neat patchwork of metal and so is the rest of his body oh my god.

He stands, facing you completely. His eyes blank, a gentle white glow, no irises or pupils at all. He’s not wearing any clothes, but you suppose he doesn’t need them, having no parts that needed to be covered up and no need to keep warm. 

He just stands, staring at you, and you stare back.

You look up and what appears to be an observation deck and a room just above it. You realize that from that room you are probably being watched.

You decide you should probably say something.

‘So…’ yeah, real smooth strider.

‘aaaAaaRRE you the Godhead human?’ he asks, his voice almost completely robotic, the sentence started with a mix of what sounded like a keyboard slam and static noise.

‘The Godhead human?’ oh wait, your chumhandle. ‘Oh, yeah that’s me.’

‘I am VVavDVAvcvaAVAvav the Vantasssssssss project; model Karkat, which is what you can call me.’

‘Wow your voice is kinda weird, isn’t it?’

‘Wow, you’re an insensitive assholllllllljlhnllwe who can’t say anything without fucking insullllllllllltingong someone. Are you fukcfding projreisvklerg-’

‘Okay, okay, just, stop before you hurt yourself.’

‘VOCAL SYSTEMS STAAAAAAAAAAAABILIZING’ he yelled. ‘There, that should be better.’

‘What the fuck?’

‘I have a fucking difficulty multitasking you ignorant fuckwit. I dropped the connection functions I was working on just so I could fuckinodfgbnkjdgng speak to you.’

‘You did it again though.’

‘I’m not fucking perfect, shit-for-brains! I am five days old you ugly shitmuffin!’

Wow, this is so much more amusing than talking to him over the internet; he gets so pissed off so easily.

‘Are you “feared” at me? They said you might be.’

‘am I feared at you? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

‘Wait, there’s another word for that.’ He says, putting a finger to his chin as he thought hard for a moment. ‘Scared! Are you “scared” at me?’

‘Wait, you mean am I scared _of_ you?’

‘Yeah, whatever.’

‘No. Why would I be scared of you? You’re just some asshole of a tin-can.’

‘Tin-can, what is a tin-can?’

‘Ask one of _them_.’ You say, still not entirely sure who _they_ are.

‘Uurgh. You are… infuriating.’ He says, having to think to remember the word he’s looking for.

‘It’s a talent.’ You say smugly. He glares at you his best robot glare for a few moments. ‘By the way, my actual name is Dave.’ 

‘Dave human.’

‘No, just Dave.’

‘Dave human, how do you have not-bored fun?’ he asks. Wow.

‘Well Karkat, let me teach you all about fun.’ Okay, you’ll admit that out of context, that could have sounded really bad, but you know that he won’t understand that. Besides, you have a few tricks up your sleeves that you can teach him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didnt want it to be Crocker corp but i couldnt think of anything else T^T  
> perhaps next chapter i will introduce the other robot 0u0
> 
> also, thankyou to all those who have left comments. i check them all the time, so thankyou for your feedback and i'm glad you are enjoying the story so far 0u0


	7. Apathy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Karkat is somewhat confused about how he can't feel emotions, and Dave flips his shit for a few seconds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for not updating for so long.

You are sad.

You think that’s what it’s called anyway, human sadness. Not that you actually feel it, but you can still say you are sad.

You always act like you have emotions and feelings but you’re really just an emotionless pile of metal all scraped up together and tied up with some wires.

You’re nothing special.

Everyone treats you like you are but you’re not.

You can’t even feel.

You’re just a heartless, high-tech tin-can.

Heartless, you wonder why that word hurts so much.

Wait, it can’t hurt, you don’t feel.

You guess it just feels… cold.

You feel emptier.

Physically, though.

You can feel physically, but that’s only so that you can get used to human limitations and understand human fragility more.

Basically, they only let you feel pain so you know what it’s like, so you don’t go around accidentally killing people and not understanding why.

You guess you like being able to feel pain, it gives you one tiny scrap of humanity to cling to.

Humanity? What are you thinking? You don’t need humanity.

You’re a robot, you don’t feel, you don’t think independently, and you don’t get bored.

Even though, if you could, you’d be thinking about how you’re really bored now and are tired of not feeling.

Not feeling sucks.

Pain sucks too.

It’s still there, a little, just where your right arm used to be.

Yeah, in that “experiment” they did, they tore off your arm to they could see if the nano repair technology in you worked.

You guess it is, the little stump of wires that was there yesterday seems a little longer.

Right now, you really wish you could talk to the Dave human- no, Dave, you wish you could talk to Dave.

Dave is the only human who treats you as if you aren’t something special, or something strange, but he treats you like you’re something ordinary.

You guess,

You really like being ordinary.

Wait, you can’t “like” things either. Fuck.

You’ve been left alone in your really big room again with nothing but the bed to even touch. It’s not even a bed, it’s more like a bench.

You’re not allowed to touch the computers or equipment along the walls of the room, so it just leaves you, your bench and a whole lot of empty floor space.

Sometimes people come and look at you through the window in the room above you, but all you do is stare at them, because there’s really nothing else to do, but it just unnerves them, and they leave quickly.

That girl comes to see you every now and then. You try to treat her like an equal and not a piece of shit, because she’s nice. She never stays long though because she’s in charge of looking after that other robot and that one needs constant attention.

You hate that robot. Well, you fake-robot-hate that robot. It gets all the attention and the nice people and if it doesn’t get what it wants it just screams until it gets it. You know, because sometimes you can hear it all the way from here. It’s just a stupid, half-wit failure, and its good for absolutely nothing. It has no purpose, it didn’t fulfil its requirements, that is why they cast it aside and created you.

_You_ are the success.

_You_ are the one that will actually be able to do what you were built for.

Why does _the failure_ get treated better than you?

You know you probably sound like a selfish human child, but it’s not fair.

You want that robot to die.

Or rather, break.

You just want to talk to the Dave human again.

 

-

 

Your name is Dave Strider and it has been three days since you sent Karkat the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff link. Which, much to your dismay, did not confuse his computerized brain one bit.

You have been talking to him every now and then, once or twice each day, and you received a phone call yesterday notifying you that Karkat’s _Science humans_ wanted you to go back again.

At eight in the morning.

_Eight in the fucking morning._

You are currently standing in the elevator waiting for it to arrive on the correct floor. You fight off a yawn as the doors open up to the lobby-reception-foyer-hall-thing again.

The woman from last time is leaned up against the wall, phone in hand, her other hand in her lab coat pocket with a clipboard under her arm.

‘This way.’ She says before walking off without waiting for your response.

‘You don’t look so good today.’ You point out, noticing how pale and sallow she looked.

‘Haven’t had coffee.’ She responds.

‘Fair enough.’ You say, unable to hold back a yawn as you say it.

‘There.’ She says as she enters the correct code and the massive doors slide open. You wonder why there’s so much security and protection on Karkats room. ‘please stay as long as you can, for the time being, the higher ups have no use for him and he’s just sitting there bored and alone.’ She says before walking off as the doors begin to close.

You walk in and see his red eyes already staring at you.

‘DAVE HUMAN’ he yells.

‘Too loud, too early.’ You say, holding your hands to your face.

‘Do not complain, you had a whole three hours to sleep in the night!’

‘I need ten.’

‘Bullshit, three is too many, you over-privileged pompous asshole.’

‘Fuck you.’ Is your intelligent, witty reply.

‘Dave human, I have a question!’

‘What is it, Karkat robot’

‘Dave human, what is a hug?’ his question surprises you a little.

‘Something you’re not getting from me.’ You almost snap.

‘But what is it, moron?’

‘It’s where like, you put your arms around each other.’ You try and mimic it by holding your arms out as if you were hugging someone.

‘Oh I see.’ Is all he says while he looks at you curiously, though somewhat as if you’re crazy.

You suddenly notice for the first time he’s missing an arm.

‘What the- holy fuck, what- how the-’

‘Coherent sentences, Dave human.’

‘You- your arm!’

‘What about it?’ he says, looking down at his still intact arm.

‘Not that one you dumbfuck!’ you say, slowly regaining your cool.

‘You mean the one that is missing’ he states, rather than asks, his computerized voice faltering strangely at the end of his sentence.

‘What the fuck happened?’ you ask.

‘They broke it off.’ 

‘Who?’

‘The science humans.’

‘What?!’ you can’t help but feel a little outraged. They did this to their own creation, but why?

‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’ll be fixed soon.’

‘How can it be fixed when it’s completely gone?!’

‘It’ll fix itself. I can do stuff like that.’

‘What?’ you are so confused. He then goes on to explain in great detail, the Nano technology and self-replicating/repairing cells that make up the materials of his body.

It takes about fifteen minutes and you understood only the first two, before he started speaking in straight scientific jargon.

After about three hours, someone opens the door at the top of the metal staircase and walked down to the landing before calling out to you to follow him. You ask what for. He tells you you have been provided a free lunch.

You slip off your seat on Karkat’s bench/bed thing and head up to him immediately.

Karkat complains, but the man assures you both you will be returning again today.

You walk up the stairs and out the door after the man and into another massive hallway. Just as you walk out you see a woman walk by. The same Lalonde woman from earlier. 

She’ holding the hand of a child and walking slowly to match the kid’s pace.

You quickly notice that it isn’t a child and oh fuck it looks just like Karkat.

Only, wearing a thick red sweater.

The Lalonde chick-lady-person notices you and calls you over.

‘So they gave you a lunch break, huh?’ she says when you approach.

‘Yeah.’ You say, trying to keep your eyes on her rather than letting them wander to the kid-bot thing. Oh heck, you’re wearing shades; no one’s going to notice you staring.

‘We’re headed round to the break room now, wanna come with us instead of being a loner?’ she seemed different to before, not crabby, (you assume she’d got her daily dose of caffeine by now) and not all customer-service-face like the other day.

You guess she just seemed a bit happier.

‘Yeah, sure, okay.’ You agree. Going with someone you know just a little sounds better than being in a room full of strangers by yourself.

‘Mrs Lalonde-’ starts the other guy before he’s interrupted.

‘It’s _Miss_. Do I fuckin’ look married to you?’ she snaps at him angrily.

‘Uh, my apologies Miss, but Mr Strider must be escorted to-’

‘Don’t care. I’m in charge of him, am I not?’

‘Yes Miss but-’

‘Off you go then.’ She said making shooing motions with her hand.

Watch out we got a badass over here.

There is no longer any doubt in your mind that she’s related to your Lalonde.

You notice the kid-thing tugging on the sleeve of her lab coat gently, trying to get her attention. She kneels down to his eye level and lets him whisper into her ear.

He’s probably just over a metre tall and looks kinda like a kid who’s eight or nine-ish.

‘yes, yes, I won’t do it again… yes, I’ll go apologise later… no, we’re going to get something to eat now… yes I know you can’t actually eat, but I need to… well maybe that offends me! Did you think of that…? Yeah, I’m sorry, let’s go now, okay?’ she says back to him quiet and gently, before standing up and taking his hand again before looking back to you.

‘Want some free food, Strider?’ she asks you.

You nod and follow and god she reminds you so much of Rose.

 

-

 

Ugh, if you weren’t in the presence of a stranger, you’d be getting your ass lectured off right now.

You make a mental note to thank Dave for existing later.

You wanted to take him with you instead, because well, you _are_ in charge of him while he’s here, (you were so happy when the boss told you that agh it means you’re close to a promotion again and actually getting to work on shit) and well, you figure you can have a bit of fun with him while he’s here.

Whoa whoa whoa, you meant with his head.

You’re gonna screw with his mind.

Anyway, he recognised your name last time, maybe you know him from somewhere? Or maybe you know someone he knows? Or maybe he knows someone you know.

Whatever, you’ll figure it out soon enough.

Anyhow, you’ll head to the break room because you are starving and you’re sure Dave is too. You want more coffee too.

Coffee will be necessary to make it through the day.

It always is here.

With all these idiots around, sometimes you feel like you’re the only one holding everything together around here.

You were such a total bitch to that guy sent to take Dave to where ever he was going because you hate him.

He’s just a massive dick.

He sucks up to the boss like his life depends on it and is basically just a half-wit yes-man.

Also, at last year’s Christmas party, (which you didn’t want to go to but your boss said he wanted to see you there so you didn’t want to piss him off) he got drunk off his face and kept trying to get you to drink some of whatever the fuck he was drinking.

In the end, you had to punch him.

You’d been clean for nearly three years at the time, and you had no intention of falling off the wagon again.

Now, you’ve been completely sober for three and a half.

You’re proud of yourself, but you don’t talk about your previous problems to anyone.

You had to clean up your act when you decided you wanted this job. During your time studying, you drank only once.

Since getting employed here, you haven’t even looked at a bottle twice.

You arrive at the break room and watch Dave’s jaw drop in awe at how big it is.

You tell him to take a seat and ask the little one at your side to sit down too.

You then power-walk over to the coffee machine because you really need- okay, maybe you don’t need it but still, you really want your caffeine fix okay?

Fuck everyone who says you drink too much coffee.


	8. Benign Envy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Karkat goes over some pesterlogs and makes some decisions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i havent updated in so long, (its been nearly a month 0_0) i have been lacking the motivation to write and taken up knitting, hopefully i'll keep writing more as this chapter will hopefully get the ball rolling for me.
> 
> nothing much really happens in this chapter until right at the end. :(
> 
> this is poorly edited and slightly rushed.
> 
> i am completely butchering this au i am sorry.
> 
> thanks a bunch if you are still with me here at this point.

It has been nearly a week since you last saw Dave and over that time, you have held many conversations with him on Pesterchum.

His stubborn human nature and his need to express his strong human opinions have gotten you thinking. Thinking about a lot of things and it’s really the thinking that’s causing all your problems.

 

THIS TUESDAY – PESTERLOGS

 

turntechGodhead:

 

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 13:40 --

VP: HUMAN.

VP: HUMAN.

VP: WE HAVENT SPOKEN SINCE YESTERDAY.

VP: HAVE YOU HUMAN DIED?

TG: na man you aint getting rid of me that easily

VP: GOOD.

VP: I MEAN

VP: IT’S NOT LIKE I CARE.

VP: IT’S JUST THAT I’D HAVE TO FIND SOME OTHER WORTHLESS HUMAN TO DROP ALL MY BOREDOM ON.

TG: sure

TG: you definitely aren’t totally into the hot strider ass

VP: WHAT.

TG: you heard me

VP: I KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS I’M NOT STUPID.

TG: i know you know what it means that’s why i said it

VP: UGH, WHATEVER.

TG: let me guess

TG: my name is karkat dumbass and im bored so im gonna make you talk to me for the next twelve hours because i have nothing else to do so that makes it automatically your problem

VP: HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD.

VP: AT LEAST I THINK THAT’S WHAT YOU HUMANS SAY.

VP: ANYWAY,

VP: ENTERTAIN ME.

TG: and if I say no

VP: I WILL DESTROY YOU.

TG: fair enough

TG: so sup

VP: I SAID ENTERTAIN ME NOT SEND ME A BORING PROMPT TO A BORING CONVERSATION.

TG: man youre the boring one

VP: I AM NOT.

TG: are too

TG: hey you know what you should do

VP: ARE YOU GONNA TELL ME OR ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE ME GUESS?

TG: you should

TG: hey

TG: have some patience douchenugget

TG: you should change your chumhandle

VP: MY WHAT-NOW

TG: oh god you are useless.

TG: the name you use on pesterchum???

VP: OH

VP: THAT.

VP: WHY SHOULD I CHANGE THAT?

TG: because it’d make you less boring and give you something to think about when youre bored and alone

VP: OH OKAY.

TG: but you should totes make it karkatmcDouchenozzle

VP: FUCK YOU

TG: no that’s your job

VP: I

TG: I am literally laughing so hard here you have no idea you took nearly ten minutes to answer that and when you did all you said was i

VP: WELL MAYBE *YOU* SHOULD TRY HAVING THE BRAIN OF A CHILD AND HAVE SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING WEIRD LIKE THAT TO YOU.

TG: i bet your weird robot brain did like some weird shit like short circuiting or something help me striders shouldn’t laugh this hard it wasn’t even funny

VP: UGH I HAVE TO GO.

VP: THEY WANNA DO THEIR TEST SHIT ON MY ARM AGAIN.

TG: ok bro talk to you later

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering vantasProject [VP] at 14:12 --

 

 

THIS WEDNESDAY

 

turntechGodhead:

 

 

\-- vamtasProject [VP] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 01:59 --

VP: DAVE, ARE YOU THERE?

TG: i am now

VP: WERE YOU SLEEPING?

TG: yeah don’t worry about it tho

TG: how did your testy shit go

VP: MY ARM GROWTH IS PROGRESSING AT A NORMAL, “HEALTHY” SPEED.

TG: thats good

VP: YEAH BUT THEY WANT ME TO GO FASTER.

VP: DAVE I CANT MAKE IT GROW ANY FASTER.

TG: just chill itll be fine

VP: IT WONT

VP: IF THEY WANT SOMETHING TO HAPPEN

VP: IT’LL HAPPEN.

VP: OR THEY’LL MAKE IT HAPPEN.

TG: just chill

TG: you gotta stop letting them own you

VP: THAT’S A BIT HARD WHEN THEY ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY *DO* OWN ME.

TG: you know what i mean

TG: stand up to them and demand your rights if you have to

TG: youre practically human you should get treated like one

VP: YEAH BUT…

VP: THAT’S NEVER GONNA HAPPEN BECAUSE I’M JUST THEIR LITTLE SCIENCE PROJECT.

VP: I’M BITS OF SPECIALLY ENGINEERED METAL ALL SLAPPED TOGETHER AND I DONT ACTUALLY HAVE FEELINGS BUT SOMETIMES I FORGET THAT.

VP: AND THEY DONT CARE ABOUT ME, THEY ONLY CARE THAT I WORK BETTER THAN THE OTHERS AND I CAN FUNCTION PROPERLY.

VP: THEY’RE NOT EVEN GONNA KEEP ME, YOU KNOW THAT?

VP: ONCE THEY’VE GOT THIS STUFF ALL FIGURED OUT THEY’RE GOING TO USE ME TO BUILD REPLICAS OF MY DESIGN.

VP: AND AFTER THAT THEY WONT NEED ME ANYMORE.

VP: I’M JUST THE PROTOTYPE.

VP: THEY’LL DEACTIVATE ME WHEN THEY’RE DONE WITH ME.

VP: THROW ME AWAY LIKE TRASH.

VP: …

VP: DAVE ARE YOU ASLEEP?

VP: …I’LL TAKE THAT AS A YES.

VP: OKAY.

VP: GOOD NIGHT I GUESS.

VP: SLEEP WELL.

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 02:23 --

 

 

THIS FRIDAY

 

 

turntechGodhead

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 11:23 --

VP: DAVE. ARE YOU THERE?

TG: yeah man im signed in

VP: GOOD.

VP: I AM BORED.

VP: I HAVENT BEEN PERMITTED TO LEAVE MY ROOM FOR A WHILE.

VP: OR EVEN SEE ANYONE.

TG: damn man that sucks

TG: u ok

VP: YES I AM PERFECTLY “OK” I CAN’T NOT BE “OK”.

TG: you cant

VP: YES STRIDER, THAT IS WHAT I SAID.

TG: how can you cant be

VP: I

VP: I DONT UNDERSTAND.

TG: i worded it really weird im sorry

TG: how can you not be not ok

TG: youre always complaining because youre upset i dont think youre ok when you do that

VP: DAVE,

VP: I AM A ROBOT.

VP: I AM ALWAYS OKAY BECAUSE I DONT ACTUALLY HAVE EMOTIONS.

TG: yeah you do you always make a big fuss about showing them

TG: especially when youre angry

TG: and bored

VP: THOSE AREN’T REAL EMOTIONS DAVE, IT’S HOW I’M PROGRAMMED TO REACT TO THINGS.

TG: were you programmed to be snarky sarcastic defiant cheeky dickwaffle

VP: UH, NO?

TG: then its not how youre programmed

TG: its how you react EMOTIONALLY to things

TG: you have feelings man

TG: youre allowed to have feelings

VP: I KNOW BUT.

VP: JUST BECAUSE I’M *ALLOWED* TO HAVE FEELINGS DOESN’T MEAN I DO.

TG: karkat you are the most emotional and moody person i know

TG: you have emotions ok bro?

VP: YEAH FINE. WHATEVER.

TG: shit man my kitchen just caught fire

TG: gotta go

TG: ill take pictures of it though ok

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering vantasProject [VP] at 11:48 --

 

At the time you weren’t sure why he was taking pictures of a fire rather than making extinguishing it his first priority, but he sent you the photo afterwards and the size of that god damned thing it was literally eating his kitchen. 

But half destroyed apartment aside, those few conversations were the key reasons you’d been thinking.

You have taken an interest in the human race and spent most of your free time searching the web for information on them. You still claim to most, (Dave especially) that you have the brain of a small human child, however you are probably already smarter than Dave, even though you are nearly sixteen years younger than him. The nice scientist Lalonde lady noticed your internet history and gave you something the humans call a “gift”. This “gift” in particular was called a Book. According to science Roxy lady, there are billions of books in the world, though you’d never seen one before and you were quite frankly, amazed. A thick hard surface with hundreds, if not thousands of tiny sheets inside called “pages” made out of paper. Each page is filled with strange markings and images. You’d asked Roxy what it all was and she seemed baffled by your question.

You see, it turns out that you actually can’t read. Well, couldn’t. You can now.

Turns out, you’d never actually read anything. Because everything sent to you or that you’d read over the internet had all been within your own mainframe, your computer-brain had absorbed and processed into information that uploaded itself into your memory capacities.  
You still don’t understand it but whatever.

Fucking technology.

So fucking confusing.

But Roxy decided to teach you how to read by “gift”ing you another book that is really, really old and about “wizards” or something that she really loves.

She read through the first few chapters with you taught you what all the words said and how you should pronounce them and then left you with it while she went back to work. 

After you’d finished it, you went back to the other book which you’d discovered was call “hooman bye-oh-liggy”. You do not know what this means, even to this moment. Though the book is about humans and how their bodies work and how they are damaged and how they are healed. It is a very good book and you don’t understand it so you’ll keep reading over and over until Roxy comes back and explains it to you.

After you’d put down the book, you returned to the internet and stumbled across an early article on Nanotechnology. Articles on said subject are rare on the internet as the technology is usually used in private government works and experiments these days. The article was published in 2083, and was about the latest upgrades of the time. You learned that this technology had lead to the beginning of the project that brought you into being, as it was the first of its kind to be able to build and replicate itself.

You skimmed through it and learned that if the cells are linked to a control centre of some description, the cells can not only replicate themselves, but use absorbed particles from its surroundings to create almost any other substance.

Interesting.

You’d also done some research on weaknesses humans call “diseases”. You’d found one that has many different types called “cancer”. Apparently it’s where human body cells grow uncontrollably forming what is called a “tumour”, which in most cases has to be removed from the body in order for the human to survive.

You thought about how when the VANTAS project is complete and there are more successful robots like you being mass-produced, how you were going to be deactivated, as you wouldn’t be needed anymore. Thrown away, cut out, like removing a tumour from a human. A cancer in the body of a robot army.

You’d also found a really cool word that means cancer you think you’ll consider using it for your new chumhandle.

You’d been thinking about that too. How Dave thought you should change your chumhandle. You think he means it in a way other than just “so your name isn’t boring” but as a way to allow yourself more freedom, or to at least feel you have.

Therefore, you have thought very hard on the subject.

With all of your compiled knowledge on the human genes and biology, you consider yourself somewhat of an (amateur) geneticist. You also think that is a cool word.

Cancer. Scientist.

You don’t feel you are really wanted by the scientists who built you, so “cancer” seems to fit.

And all this studying and learning made you feel qualified to be a better scientist than any of these dumbfucks.

Cancer Scientist.

Carcino Geneticist. 

The next time you log on to Pesterchum, you will use that name to talk to Dave with.

And you’ll even change that hideous bright red text to grey.

You wonder if he’ll be human proud of you, for taking a stroll outside of the metaphorical square and being what you want to be, not what’s decided for you.

Speaking, or rather thinking, of decisions, you’d made another one yourself.

Being a robot kind of sucks. Apparently being a human really sucks too, but it can’t be worse than this. You have been reading over that Nano-tech article again and again, and you have decided to try and take control of the cells currently rebuilding your arm, which is now just waiting on a couple of fingers, and seeing the extent of exactly what they can do. This is a big thing, if it fails, then so what? But if it succeeds…

You could do normal human things, like sit around an apartment all day like Dave, and watch movies and eat food and go for walks and see the world outside of this building and see the sky for the first time ever! 

You could go to human school, play human games, learn human sports…

The list goes on.

But the point is, that you, Karkat Vantas, potentially have the ability to slowly, slowly transform yourself into a human being.

You, Karkat Vantas,

 

Could be a human.


	9. I can be human too

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave gets worried and a little pissy, Karkat gets all weird and Roxy is top bitch at her work ok

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (my chapter summaries are definatly the most informative things. yep. mhmm.)

Today was the day you got brushed off by Karkat Vantas.

Today was the day that _he_ was telling _you_ to go away.

Usually, you can’t get him to shut up, you have to practically beg him to leave you alone so you can sleep, or eat or do some other mundane task around the apartment. Except, you don’t, because Striders don’t beg.

Perhaps he’s going through a weird robot version of a teenage rebellious phase, where he’s not going to do what people want or expect him to do. Except, he probably wouldn’t, at least not to you, because from what you’ve heard from him, you are his only friend. And you kind of already know that it’s not some rebellious phase, and its really that he’s preoccupied with something else, you just don’t want to believe yourself. He seemed so distressed when you pestered him at various points during the day, practically begging for you to leave him alone but trying not to sound like he didn’t want you around.

It started this morning when you weren’t greeted by your usual “GET THE FUCK UP STRIDER. WAKE YOUR LAZY ASS UP AND TALK TO ME.” So you decided to try and piss him off by pestering him first. You decided to mock him by sending him exactly what he sends you of a morning, but you were replied to with apologies and begging, so you decided to leave him alone for a while.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering vantasProject [VP] at 09:33 --

 

TG: yo get the fuck up vantass wake your lazy ass up and talk to me

TG: now

TG: now 

TG: now

VP: STRIDER WHAT THE FUCK?

TG: its what you always do to me dude

TG: sweet revenge

VP: WHAT EVEN

TG: shh

TG: just deal with it man

TG: whats up

VP: A LOT OF STUFF, RIGHT NOW ACTUALLY.

VP: I’M KINDA BUSY.

TG: you? Busy???

VP: YES DAVE, I AM FUCKING BUSY.

TG: too busy to talk to your best bro

VP: LOOK DAVE,

VP: AS MUCH AS I WOULD REALLY LOVE TO TALK TO YOU RIGHT NOW I CAN’T.

VP: PLEASE JUST,

VP: TALK TO ME LATER? IF YOU CAN?

TG: oh

TG: ok then

VP: I’M SORRY DAVE.

VP: BYE.

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 09:38 --

 

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering vantasProject [VP] at 12:03 --

 

TG: yo vantass you still busy

VP: DAVE, TODAY I DONT THINK I WILL BE NOT BUSY.

TG: what but usually you drop everything to come running for this fine piece of strider

TG: but then again you dont really have much to drop

TG: so whatever youre doing now

TG: drop it like its hot

VP: STRIDER I DONT HAVE TIME FOR YOUR BULLSHIT.

VP: I’M TRYING TO CONCENTRATE HERE.

TG: concentrate on what

VP: NEVER YOU FUCKING MIND.

VP: OH, ALSO, LATER TODAY I’M GONNA CHANGE MY CHUMHANDLE.

VP: IF I GET THE TIME.

TG: dude changing your handle takes like 2 seconds

TG: do it now

VP: I CAN’T DAVE I’M BUSY.

TG: then at least tell me what it is

VP: DAVE.

VP: PLEASE FUCK OFF.

VP: UNTIL I PESTER YOU.

VP: I

VP: AM

VP: FUCKING

VP: BUSY.

VP: DAVE?

VP: WHERE DID YOU GO?

TG: ok so you tell me to fuck off and then ask where i went real smooth dickwit

VP: LOOK, DAVE, I’M SORRY. I DON’T MEAN TO BE SUCH A MASSIVE DOUCH BUT I REALLY CAN’T TALK RIGHT NOW. WHAT I’M DOING IS TAKING ALL OF MY CONCENTRATION AND IT’S SO INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT OKAY.

VP: I’M SORRY.

VP: JUST

VP: PLEASE

VP: PLEASE DON’T HATE ME.

TG: aw dude

TG: you cant talk like that when im off and being all pissed off at you

TG: youre makin me feel bad

VP: SORRY.

TG: no dont be sorry, i should be sayin that not you. You said you were busy i shoulda backed off.

TG: ill talk to you later then?

VP: OKAY

VP: BYE DAVE.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering vantasProject [VP] at 12:22 --

 

You know something is up with him. And it’s not anything good if he’s kicking up this much of a fuss about it. You just don’t know what to do. Not only are you bored out of your skull, but you want to ask him what’s wrong, or at least ask about his chumhandle again.

You don’t hear from him for another two days.

 

___________________________________________________

 

Today you had to tell Dave to piss off more than you’d have liked to but you really do need all of your concentration for this.

First of all, you had to hack your own programming, make a few changes to the Nano-bot’s functions, and then begin the actual transformation.

You have been sitting here on your pathetic excuse for a bed for the last nine hours working on this. It takes a lot of focus and you aren’t sure you’re even getting anywhere. It’s difficult and makes for dull work and there are so many other things you’d like to be doing but if you’re gonna do this you need to start it now.

You have been working on just your arm for the time being, just to get you started. In a few hours, you’re going to make a start on a few of the components that make up your computer brain. First of all, you’re going to start with your nervous system, just so you’ll be able to tell if this shit is even working. You figure that if you get your nervous system started, then connect it to whatever part of your body you are working on, you’ll be able to manually turn off your digital pain receptors (you can do this now yay) and strike the part of you that you are developing, and you’ll be able to feel it.

Real _human_ feel it.

You can’t wait until you’re at least part human. Your fakey robot excitement is building up. You wonder if human excitement will feel the same.

You decide not to tell Dave this, so that the stupid science humans don’t look through your chat history to find out what you’ve been saying.

You need to clear that by the way, so that they don’t ask about what you’ve been concentrating on.

You are also thinking of figuring out how to get the fuck out of here because if the science guys find out you’re gonna get in trouble. And probably deactivated. So really, your only option is to bust the fuck out of here. It might not be that hard, all you’d have to do is hack into the company’s systems, which shouldn’t be hard as you’re already connected to it, fuck around with the security systems and get out while they’re all having a mental breakdown. Which means you’re gonna have to get out before you become completely human. _If_ that is a thing that can actually happen.

So, you have allotted yourself another eight hours, forty two minutes and thirty three point four seconds to work on your arm before you switch to the kinda dangerous task of working on fixing up your own brain.

 

¬¬

 

You are getting worried about Karkat. You went in to check on him earlier, (yet again leaving a displeased Kankri with some incompetent dipshits) and saw he’s acting really quite weirdly. He didn’t move when you entered the room, he didn’t even look up when you walked down the steps, stomping annoyingly, (Karkat is the only one who will tolerate you being annoying in any way, your colleagues would hate you and your higher-ups would probably sack you. Even Kankri won’t allow it because it is “offensive”) he wouldn’t respond when you spoke and he wouldn’t respond when you called his name or clicked your fingers in front of his face. 

He had a full on mental breakdown when you tried to touch him though.

All you did was place a hand on his shoulder and you were suddenly deafened by an onslaught of incredibly loud robotic screaming “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO” and you got punched in the face and kicked a few times before you backed the fuck off.

It took a few minutes for him to stop seemingly shrugging off invisible hands and murmuring to himself and acknowledge your presence.

He said you name as though he was half asleep before blurting out apology after apology. “Sorry for hitting you, I’m sorry for yelling at you i didn’t mean to hurt you, I’m sorry”

You had to repeatedly assure him that it was okay and you were okay and everything was fine. You even offered to read to him again, but you were very politely refused, followed by more apologies. 

‘Roxy, I’m sorry, i know you have to take time out of your day to read to me and help me, and that’s really kind of you, but… i cant right now. I’m so sorry.’ You know he loves reading and being read to, (especially romance novels, you have discovered) but he insisted that he not be read to today.

And that really fucking confuses you because he literally does nothing all day and the internet bores him so what the fuck is he doing just sitting there.

You told him to just send someone out for you and you’d come as soon as you could if he wanted to talk to you. He thanked you, and you left.

You returned to the large, dimly lit room (the lights weren’t turned on and the massive window was only drawing in the low orange glow from the sunset) to find a screaming little Kankri and a bunch of people trying to calm him and hide from him at the same time.

They’re all idiots, they don’t know how to handle him. Really, this company should just hire some competent staff for once.

‘Oi, piss off dickwits’ you can get away with speaking to them like that, because even though they were technically above you, they were just attendants and security staff. There was about thirty of them in the room, no joke, you send about five to look after the boy and they call for help every time.

At your harsh dismissal, they instantly stopped touching him and gathering around him and threatening him and trying to sooth him and whatever else they were doing and stood at the wall behind you.

Kankri was still standing in the middle of the room, screaming, yelling. He’d be crying if he had tear ducts.

‘Kankri.’ You said in a gentle but quite firm voice. ‘Stop this now you are triggering people.’

The resulting “but they were triggering me!” sounded not only childish, but as if it had been said by fucking Satan himself. Demonic childish screaming.

‘Kankri. Please stop screaming.’

‘NOOooO!’

‘Kankri.’

Another deafening wail.

‘Kankri.’

He dropped into a sitting position and began loudly scream/sobbing.

‘The fuck are you all looking at? I said piss off!’ you say as you turn to the staff gathered up at the wall behind you, quite frankly amazed at your little progress with the boy. They quickly shuffled out of the room and you slowly walked to Kankri’s side.

‘Now Kankri,’ you say in a sickeningly sweet, calming voice, ‘It’s time to calm down now.’ The wailing continued, but lessened somewhat.

‘Come on, now,’ there was a trick to calming him down. First, it’s don’t take his rage and distress into consideration, force him into resignation. This is usually achieved when he stops yelling relatively coherent words and sits down or falls over. Then, is when you step in with soothing words and a gentle voice.

The key is not to touch him. Which no one else seems to understand.

After only a few minutes he calmed down.

After about a dozen, he fell asleep on your lap.

Unlike Karkat, Kankri does sleep. It’s not real sleep of course, but it works somewhat the same way. He shuts his body down to regain power.

He always falls asleep either on your lap or alone in a corner.

_____________________________________

FOUR HOURS AND THIRTEEN MINUTES.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> btw if anyone knows how to put in a solid line where i have the underscores please let me know.


	10. Resentment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave says "hiiiii" and Karkat says "..."
> 
> And Roxy gets hella angry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for not updating, i have become so lazy since i've been on school holidays. V_V

Karkat has become non-responsive. 

You were asked to come in and try to talk to him, to get at least somewhat of a reaction out of him. Your initial thoughts were he’d become so bored he’d decided to troll his caretakers into thinking he was broken or damaged. You were wrong.

Once you’d walked into the room and announced your own arrival with a loud “Sup mother-fuckers, Dave Strider in the house!” you knew something was up. He sat on his bed-table thing staring at the floor. He did not speak to you. He did not look at you.

‘Yo Karkat what’s up?’ you said as you approached him, even though you’d had a feeling it would have no effect. Karkat continued to show no signs of even being alive.

Or, functioning, or whatever a robot does.

You sat up beside him and stared into his blank red eyes, looking for something, anything. A sign he was consciously aware of himself, waiting for him to look at you. (you had discovered that if you were close enough to him, you could see his solid-coloured eyes move from behind the glass coating.) 

You had sat there for a few hours, talking to him as if you knew he could hear, making wild gestures with your hands as you explained what had happened the last time you and your friend Egbert had met up. You even told him that you were getting worried about bro, with how long he’d been away.

Though after your few hours were up, a man in a lab coat with a clipboard walked and began descending the stairs.

‘Thank you for your help, Mr Strider, but you really were our last option before we decided to do something drastic.’ he said, sounding tired as he flicked through some pages on his clipboard.

‘What do you mean?’ you asked.

‘Well, now the only thing we can do is disable him, pull him apart and see if we can fix him that way.’

‘No!’ you yelled. But your voice wasn’t alone. You looked to your left to see Karkat had averted his gaze on the floor and was looking at the man in the lab coat. Both you and the man stared back at him, stunned.

‘Karkat?’ you asked, hesitant and cautious.

‘What?’ he snapped as he turned back to you.

‘You uh, you didn’t move or speak or anything for like, two days.’ you said to him.

‘You think i don’t fucking know that?!’ he snapped back at you, voice full of static and face contorted with anger.

The guy in the lab coat had move to Karkat’s side and was moving around his limbs and checking his face, but Karkat made no attempt to stop him. When he was done, he stepped back and Karkat let out an angry sigh. 

‘Can everybody just leave me the fuck alone?!’ he yelled. Lab coat guy looked pissed, but walked back up the stairs and out the door he came from.

‘Well?!’ he snapped, turning to you. ‘I said leave me. The fuck. ALONE.’ 

You don’t think you’ve ever been more angry in your life. You had spent your whole day talking to him, begging him to show some sign of not being dead and he turns around and throws it all back in your face.

He can get fucked if he thinks you’re coming back here ever again.

You storm out and angrily fume in the back of the car on the way home.

When you get there you slam your apartment door and flop down on your bed, throwing a couple of punches at your pillow before noticing a flickering light coming from your computer.

You pick it up and check the notification.

About twenty minutes ago, you had received a message on Pesterchum. The sender had already gone offline, but you knew who it was before you’d even opened up the message.

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 15:43 --

 

VP: I’M SORRY.

 

\-- vantasProject [VP] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 15:43 --

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Dave came to visit you today but you had to mostly ignore him.

You’d paid attention to a lot of what he was saying, he’d told you about one of his friends and all the trouble they’d gotten into, and how he was worrying about his brother (you know all about human families. You’ve spent hours researching them on google.) because he’d been away so long.

You didn’t want to yell at him, but that other guy had kinda pissed you off, and if you’d shown any other response, he might’ve thought something was wrong with you and taken you apart anyway.

You cant risk that now. You probably couldn’t risk it under any normal circumstances anyway. Robots that got taken apart usually had their brains meddled with in some way. You didnt want to end up memory-less and stupid again.

But now more than ever. If you have made _any_ progress with your “transformation” then getting pulled apart would probably mean the end for you.

A robot that stops doing as it’s told is a deactivated robot.

Anyway, you had long passed your switchover time, so it’s about time you switched from focusing on your arm and started working on your brain.

You’d given hours of careful thought on which parts you needed to change first. You’d deduced that one slip up in this would mean robot-death for you.

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

YOU NAME IS KANKRI VANTAS AND YOU DO NOT LIKE THE PEOPLE ROXY SENDS TO LOOK AFTER YOU WHILE SHE’S GONE.

You don’t like how many of them there are, and how they keep sending in more. You don’t like what they say to you, or to each other, you don’t like the offensive language they use and you don’t like how they treat you or each other. They are going to offend someone and they most certainly are offending you.

But most of all you don’t like how they touch you.

They grab your arm, they try to force you to sit down. They try to hold you in place. They grab you, shove you and stop you from moving of your own accord.

Why cant Roxy just stay here? She never does things like this! She never touches you unless you touch her first and she doesn’t try to force you to do anything. So why do these people?

She never used to leave you either. She would only go to “home” once every few days and would spend all her time here with you. Your room is quite big, and has quite a large window facing the city which lets in a lot of light and has what Roxy calls a “kitchenette” which is just like the lunch room but smaller and doesn’t have any food in it unless Roxy brings it herself. But Roxy wouldn’t leave very often. She would sit at her laptop on the desk and go through her paper work, and wouldn’t talk to you much but that was how you liked it. Roxy did what she wanted without offending anyone, and you did the same. You would just sit and build the city outside out of blocks or play with little toy cars or think of ways things could offend people and how to explain that to others.

Roxy says people don’t like being told they are offensive. It offends them. Therefore, you try to think of non-offensive ways to say this. You don’t want another repeat of _**that**_ thing again.

However the people in here now are being highly offensive and you have found the least offensive way of telling them that is wailing at the top of your non-existent lungs which you cannot help but do anyway because that is what you do when you are distressed. When they don’t stop, you wail louder, higher pitched, and one of the people comes over, and before you even notice his approach and slaps you, hard across the face.

You fall silent immediately.

‘WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!’ comes an outraged voice from the door to the room.

You don’t look over, you keep your head positioned the way it was turned when you were hit. You feel yourself start to shake.

‘He wouldn’t stop!’ says a deeper voice. ‘we had to shut him up somehow!’

‘oh, and is that how you would get a child to shut up? By slapping them around the head?’

‘well, no, but-’

‘BECAUSE THAT IS ESSENTIALLY WHAT HE IS, NOW IF YOU WANT TO STILL HAVE A JOB BY TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE NOW! THE REST OF YOU TOO, I’LL HAVE YOU ALL FUCKING SACKED, YOU HEAR ME? GET THE FUCK OUT!’ most of them had fled the room before she’d even finished speaking.

You still do not move.

‘Kankri, Kankri darling are you okay?’ she says as she kneels before you. You still refuse to move. Moving will offend. Speaking will offend. Offending means people get hurt. Just like last time. You told a man not to say bad things about Roxy and you ended up broken. You are broken forever because of that. Now you will get broken again. You offended that man. Now he has hurt you. Now you will get broken again. 

‘Kankri, please, please look at me.’ she begged. You don't want to move. If you move, that man will come back. 

‘Kankri i wont let them come back, look at me please.’ you hate that Roxy is trying to help. You hate that she is trying to help a lost cause, but you cant move. You cant look at her.

You stay unmoving, all night, and Roxy sleeps beside you.

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

‘But he _hit_ him, sir!’ you yell, slamming your hands down on the desk. ‘You know he can feel it, you know his pain reception cant be turned off and you know how he reacts to these things! You know what happened to him last time, so why is that lowlife going unpunished?!’

‘Roxy, you know we are short staffed, so even if i wanted to fire him, i couldn’t. But even so, i wont fire him,’

‘Why?!’

‘You didn’t let me finish. However, because you feel so strongly about this, he will be suspended for a week.’

You let out a frustrated sigh.

‘fine. Okay. At least he wont get paid i guess.’

‘ _paid_ suspension, Roxy.’

‘What? Why?!’

‘Roxy, i suggest you calm down before i start looking into that unacceptable amount of over-time leave you have.’

‘Ugh, fine.’ you say, turning on your heel and storming out of his office. He even used your overtime to threaten you! That bastard. Though you cant think too badly of him. You _do_ have way too much holiday leave because of your overtime, which he _does_ neglect to act upon, so he’s not that bad. Anyone else as your boss and they’d have you out of the building immediately to get rid of your leave time.

You storm down the hall and back towards Kankri’s room when your phone starts buzzing in your pocket. You pick it up to see _incoming call_ on the display. You flip it open and answer with a slightly irritated “hello”.

‘Hello. Sorry to disturb you while you are at work, but i thought you might appreciate being enlightened to recent events.’

Ugh. Why is she calling, she never calls. 

‘Yeah, what?’ you ask, using your finger and your thumb on your free hand to rub at your eyes.

‘Mutini has somehow found her way to my doorstep. I was wondering how long it was since you’d last been to your apartment?’

‘Mutini?! Fuck, how the hell did she get all the way to your house?!’

‘Do not ask me, she just showed up.’

‘Fuck. Ugh, could you watch her for me tonight? I’ll be over tomorrow at about 7pm to pick her up?’

‘Certainly. It’s been a while since you last visited. I shall break out the champagne and the fine china.’

Oh my god you hate her and her sarcastic bullshit.

‘Yeah whatever. I’ll only be there for like five minutes while i grab her and go okay?’

‘Very well. Until then.’

‘yeah bye.’

You snap your phone shut and keep walking.

Great. Now you have to go halfway out of the city to find your god damned cat. How the fuck did she get over there anyway?! You thought Jane was supposed to be stopping by and feeding her! Ugh.

You get back to Kankri’s room and gently call to him and tell him you’re back. You spot him in the corner he was in when you left. Curled up, knees to his chest and his back to you, he hadn’t moved since this morning.

You decide it best to leave him be and get back to your work.

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

FUCK. THIS ISNT GOING SO WELL. YOU NEED HELP. YOU NEED DAVE. YOU WANT TO SEE DAVE RIGHT NOW MORE THAN EVER AND YOU JUST PUSHED HIM AWAY.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just hit 100 kudos, thankyou so much everyone (⌒-⌒ )


	11. The Robot Equivalent of Crying

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> many thousand apologies for not updating in over a month.
> 
> I found a way to make uploading the fic so much easier, why did nobody tell me about the rich-text option? T^T

’Hey Roxy, What’re you doing here?’ called a familliar voice as you entered one of the research labs.

‘Just checkin’ up on you doc.’ you say in response to the man standing in the middle of the room, tinkering away at something.

‘Mmhmm. That always seems to be the case.’ he mutters gently as he looks into a framed magnifying glass.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ you ask, trying to sound a little hurt.

‘You’re bored again.’ he says, pushing away the magnifying glass.

‘Wrong. 5 points from doctor English.’ Jake English was a robotics expert just like you. He had a degree in some other sciencey thing too, but you don’t remember what it was. English gets to actually work with building and developing the robots, unlike you. Probably because he’s about ten years older than you and has been working here since he got out of school.

‘Actually i was hoping you could give me some advice for Kankri.’

‘And what’s the little Kankri-bot gotten up to now?’

‘Well, that’s the problem. He’s not doing anything. He won’t move.’

English looks up from his work and stares at you.

‘Why? Do you know what’s wrong? Where is he now?’

‘He’s in his room, huddled up in the corner. Won’t speak, won’t move, won’t respond to anything.’ English narrows his eyes with concern.

‘We had another... Incident.’ you say.

‘Oh.’ Jake says after a moment. ‘Perhaps... Perhaps i could go have a look at him, when I’m done here?’

‘I’d appreciate that.’ you say as English moves back to his tinkering. ‘Also, what’s up with Karkat?’

‘Ah. Well, the situation with Karkat isn’t so good right now.’

‘Still not responding?’ you ask.

‘Well, there’s that, but...’ he trails off.

‘But what?’

‘But... The higher-ups want him deactivated.’

You freeze and your eyes open wide. Hearing that sentence was like having a bucket of ice water dumped over you.

‘What... What the fuck?’ you say, but it comes out as barely a whisper.

‘I’m doing everything i can to stop it, but i don’t think it’ll do much.’

‘But why?’ you ask, almost yelling.

‘Roxy, do you remember the Signless?’

The name fills your mind with memories from years ago.

‘How could i forget?’ you answer.

‘Well, they seem to think his non-responsiveness is somehow connected to what happened back then.’

‘But that’s completely different!’

‘Not really.’

‘Ugh, whatever. See you when you come around, I guess?’

‘Alright, bye Roxy.’

You wont let them deactivate Karkat. He’s much more “self aware” as some would say than anyone realises, than even he realises! He’s practically human! And if they deactivate Karkat because they think he’s going to turn out like the signless, that puts Kankri at risk too, being part of the same series and built and programmed the same way, there’s not much of a chance he’ll escape deactivation.

You won’t let them take either of them away from you. They’ll build more, and there’s the biggest problem. Every robot in the VANTAS series that has shown some sort of cognitive response has gone through horrible things. The first one to respond came to life screaming, and had to be destroyed. The second couldn’t learn to speak so he was destroyed. A few others after that lived through some sort of physical or mental pain in their short lives until they broke down or were deactivated.

The Signless, well, he’s a whole other story. His is probably the worst.

Kankri would have been the last in the line of VANTAS’s had he not been deemed unfit for his purposes after the “incident” where he was beaten until the damage was near irreversible.

You can already tell Karkat is going through something here. Even before he started being non-responsive, he always seemed down. You <em>really</em> hope that his mental facilities havent developed enough for him to have the capabilities to have something like depression. You know all the poor kid wants is to go outside and live like a normal kid, and the fact that he can’t is probably killing him.

So now you draw the line at Karkat. You love those two robots to pieces but you cant let them build anymore, or you’ll see both the current Vantas’s and the next ones suffer.

You won’t let them create another generation of VANTAS’s.

You won’t let them create another generation of sufferers.

 

* * *

 

You’ve been asked to come in and see Karkat again, despite the lack of results from your last visit. You are kind of dreading it, because you feel somewhat unwelcome there now, like you’ll only get screamed out of the place again. You step out of the elevator to find Roxy waiting for you, as usual, only this time she was jabbering away to someone over the phone. With nothing more than a wave of her hand, she began to walk quickly down the hall. Obeying her hand movement, you followed.

You hear tiny snippets of her conversation as you follow her.

‘Well, i didn’t get any messages!’

‘Yeah, i know, i know.’

‘But how the fuck did he get all the way over to that part of the fucking city? Is that even physically possible?!’

‘Stupid cat.’

‘Yeah, yeah okay.’

‘I’m going to get him tomorrow. Have to take fuckin’ time off work to get out there.’

‘Okay, can you stop having a go at me for my work hours! I’m so sick of it Janie.’

‘Yeah, i know. I gotta look after him though.’

‘Mhmmm.’

‘Speaking of which, you busy tomorrow night, Crocker?’

‘Sweet. You wanna get something to eat somewhere? I haven’t eaten anything decent for weeks. My diet has literally been limited to pizza pockets and toasted sandwiches.’

‘No.’

‘Hangon a sec.’

‘Okay, Dave?’ she says, suddenly stopping and turning to you, catching you by surprise.

‘Yeah?’

‘Just… try and get him to do something. Anything, just, don’t raise your voice or touch him unless he says you can, okay? Just… do your best.’

‘Okay’ is all you say before she walks off and continues her conversation with “Janie”.

You open the massive door just enough for you to step inside and close it behind you.

‘Hello Dave.’ You hear him say before you even begin to approach him.

‘Hey bro, wassup?’ you guess being casual is probably the best way to speak with him. Treat him normally and not like there’s something wrong with him.

‘Nothing really. The usual sitting around doing nothing. You know how it is.’

‘Yeah. Nothing interesting happen at all?’

‘nope.’

‘Okay.’

You stand there awkwardly for about a minute before he tilts his head towards you, still looking at the floor and asks you if you want to sit with him. You plonk your ass down next to him, though keep about a foots distance between you.

‘What has been going on with you?’ he asks, voice going all staticy.

‘Same old, same old. Hittin’ some sick beats, doing my thing, y’know?’ he nods his head. ‘I’ve been waiting for my bro to come back, too.’

‘He still has not returned?’

‘Nope.’

‘Are you afraid?’

‘Of what?’

‘Of having you brother not return to your home. Are you afraid of not seeing him again?’

‘Naw, bro always taught me not to worry bout shit like that. He’ll be back when he wants to be.’

‘But do you not love him?’ His question surprises you. ‘Is he not your only both fraternal <em>and</em> paternal figure? Are you not afraid of being alone without ever seeing him again?’

You don’t move. You think over your answer very carefully in your head.

‘Well… i guess, yeah. I guess i am. But he always promised me he’d come back okay? So, i trust him when he says that.’

‘I see.’ He says, you guess he’s decided not to press the matter. That’s when you notice he has both his arms, fully intact.

‘Holy shit bro, did you get a fucking arm transplant or something?’

‘What, oh, no, i grew it back.’

‘What, no seriously.’

‘Seriously, i did. Nano-technology.’

‘right.’ Well shit son.

‘That is why i have been so quiet.’

‘Oh. Well that explains it.’

‘Yeah.’

Okay, now you know what’s up, you feel a little better, but that doesn’t change the fact that this conversation is awkward as fuck.

‘Dave.’ Karkat says after a few minutes of silence.

‘Yeah man?’

He hesitates for about another half a minute.

‘I need help.’

He ducks his head down and you think he looks like he might be shaking. You think this is what would be the robot equivalent of crying.

You have no clue what to do, so you just put your arm around him and hope he doesn’t shrug you off.

He doesn’t. he leans into you and you put your other arm around him. The situation is too serious to go without an unironic hug.

 

* * *

 

 

Hesitantly, you knock on the large mahogany door.

After two seconds, there is no answer so you decide she mustn’t be home and are just about to turn away when you hear footsteps and a voice on the other side.

‘Roxy, What a pleasant surprise.’ She says with a pleased smirk.

‘Cut the shit. Where’s my cat?’

‘Not even going to come in? I had afternoon tea prepared and everything!’

‘Rose, where is my cat, i am extremely busy and i just want to get back to work.’

‘Very well.’ Whoa, was that disappointment in that sigh you just heard? Surely not.

Rose returned to the door with your ashamed-looking kitten in her hands.

‘Please tell me you have a pet cage to put him in.’

‘Nope. He can just sit in my car.’ Rose rubbed her temples with a sigh.

‘You are certain you couldn’t stay a little while? I have some tea i just prepared.’ You sigh.

‘Rose i can’t, I told Janie I’d meet her in like, five minutes, and I’m already going to be late.’

‘Very well. Goodbye Roxy.’

‘Bye.’

She stays on the doorstep until you drive away.

You guess that you hadn’t spoken to her in so long because of the fight you had last time you talked, kind of made you forget a lot about her.

You certainly never considered the fact she might get lonely living in that big house with only a cat for company. Maybe you should have just let her keep Mutini. You certainly don’t care for him very well.

You get onto the main road and Mutie meows next to you. You look down at him on the front seat and when you look back up you have to swerve violently to avoid hitting another car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jake wasn't going to be a character in here at all, but i needed someone to fill a place and he seemed the only person i liked for that position. also he appears to be a very mature Jake.
> 
> Also, i know i wrote Mutini as a female in the past, but i checked the wiki and Mutie is indeed male.  
> My apologies for this mistake.
> 
> I now have two pages of comments of this fic and 127 kudos. thankyou so much to everyone for reading and for sticking with the fic so far. i appreciate it alot. I'm very glad some of you seem to be enjoying the fic, even though i personally think its shit, but hey, that was the point in starting my two fics on here. to improve. i like to think i have improved along the way (in both of my ongoing fics, but especially in Dyst.stuck) and i hope to keep doing so.
> 
> Thank you again, you lovely, lovely people.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> stuff happens and u woT MATE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorr fo no updat  
> los o school shiz  
> hush no words only chapter now

You know exactly what happened when Dave had visited you. You shouldn’t, but you do.

You should be incapable of it, but you suppose due to your droid-to-human thing you guess you lost control of your emotions and the teeny tiny human part of you took over.

You never thought you’d be able to cry.

Even though you never actually shed tears, you did feel somewhat better afterwards. Dave being there helped. It was embarrassing, but it helped. It was a bit awkward when he left but oh well.

You have been waiting for a chance to pester him, when he won’t be sleeping and you won’t be concentrating, so you can finally change your chum handle, and be completely untraceable to the sciencey people. Yes, you do know that you are still completely traceable, they just have to know about the new name, and yes, you do still call them the “sciencey people”. You’ve taken a break from your work to wait for Dave to come online and also to take a look at the new book Roxy brought in for you last night. You pick up the heavy, hardcover book and let the book fall open on your lap. The pages automatically open to a page about a third of the way through the book, but before turning to the start, you notice something about this page in particular. Like every other book, the page is filled with hundreds of words, a number at the bottom, and the chapter title above all the paragraphs. That was all the same, but what was different, was what you assume to be the reason this page in particular opened up.

There was a piece of paper wedged in between the two pages.

You open it up and unfold it to find a note, written in a deep pink pen.

_Karkat,_

_You are in danger. you need to get away from here._  
i tried my best but i cant do anything about it,  but the higher ups are going to deactivate you and erase your data  
act normally, you have a week  
if you can get on a secure server contact that dave boy if hes trustworthy enough.  
if we’re going to get you out of here we’ll need his help

_Destroy this note_

_R_

R, you assume to be Roxy, seen as she did bring you the book. But if what she says is true, then you need to contact Dave immediately. Tell him what’s going on and try to plan a breakout if possible, if its not too risky for Dave. You also need to talk to Roxy, see what she can do to help.

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 10:53 --

CG: GET THE FUCK ONLINE RIGHT NOW.

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] is now an idle chum! –

TG: who the fuck

CG: IT’S ME.

TG: informative

CG: IT’S KARKAT FUCKING VANTAS WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

TG: oh hey sup dude

TG: whats up with the name change

CG: YOU ARE THE ONE WHO TOLD ME TO CHANGE MY FUCKING NAME.

CG: I HAVE TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT SOMETHING.

TG: whats up with the whole carcinogeneticist thing dude

CG: I’M NOT GOING TO EXPLAIN IT NOW OK, I NEED TO TALK TO YOU.

TG: what does that even fucking mean

CG: DAVE.

TG: yeah

CG: PLEASE LISTEN.

CG: I HAVE RECEIVED INFORMATION THAT MY LIFE(?) IS IN DANGER.

TG: whoa whoa what

CG: THAT’S ANOTHER REASON BEHIND THE NAME CHANGE.

CG: THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE HERE WANT TO DEACTIVATE ME AND ERASE MY DATA. THEY THINK I’M FAULTY. I HAVE UNTIL THE END OF THE WEEK.

CG: IF I’M GOING TO MAKE IT, I’LL NEED YOUR HELP DAVE.

TG: dude is this actually legit

TG: coz if youre pulling some shit i swear to god

CG: NO, I TRUST MY SOURCE.

CG: I NEED YOU TO HELP ME ESCAPE.

TG: you want me to bust you out

TG: im going to try anyway but seriously how the FUCK are we going to do that?!!

CG: I DONT KNOW. I’LL GET ROXY TO SCHEDULE ANOTHER VISIT FOR YOU.

CG: THEN

CG: I DONT KNOW.

CG: WHAT WOULD I DO?

CG: WHERE COULD I POSSIBLY GO?

TG: here

TG: you could come live with me

CG: DAVE THEY KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.

CG: THEY’D FIND ME AND YOU’D BE PUNISHED.

TG: there are plenty of other places we could go

CG: WE?

TG: yeah dude we

CG: DAVE YOU ARENT COMING WITH ME.

TG: says who

CG: SAYS ME. YOU AREN’T COMING IT’D CAUSE TOO MUCH TROUBLE FOR YOU.

TG: dude im coming with you

TG: we could just hide out in the city

TG: or skip town or something

TG: we’d be safe somewhere

CG: DAVE NO.

CG: LOOK, I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING OUTSIDE OF THIS ROOM AND A COUPLE OF HALLWAYS SO YOU TALKING ABOUT SKIPPING TOWN AND GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE JUST SEEMS REALLY WEIRD TO ME.

CG: THE WORLD IS A LOT BIGGER THAN I CAN COMPREHEND.

TG: so what the world is huge and awesome well bust you out and we can go fucking wherever

TG: im going to get you out and im going to go with you and that’s final

CG: PLEASE DON’T BE SO DIFFICULT.

TG: im not

TG: i just want to help you karkat ok

CG: UGH OKAY, WE’LL SORT ALL THAT STUFF OUT WHEN THE TIME COMES BUT RIGHT NOW WE NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET OUT OF HERE FIRST.

CG: YOU COULD COME TO VISIT AND HAVE A HEAP OF SUPPLIES PACKED AND EVERYTHING.

CG: AND WHEN YOU GO TO LEAVE ROXY CAN CAUSE SOME SORT OF DISTRACTION AND WE COULD RUN OUT

CG: I DONT KNOW I’LL HAVE TO DISCUSS IT WITH HER I GUESS.

TG: roxys the blonde one right

CG: NO FUCKING SHIT.

TG: jus checkin dude

TG: ok when can you talk to her next

CG: HER NEXT BREAK I GUESS

CG: WHICH IS IN APPROXIMATELY 55 MINUTES AND 33.586792 SECONDS.

TG: dude

CG: WHAT

TG: youll be all normal and all of a sudden you just do a weird roboty thing

TG: i kinda forget you even are a robot till you say something like that

CG: REALLY?

CG: YOU MEAN, TALKING TO ME IS JUST LIKE TALKING TO ANOTHER HUMAN?

TG: yeah dude

CG: WOW

CG: OK

CG: WELL

CG: SHIT SCIENCE GUY COMING IN GOT TO GO

TG: wait

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at  12:24 --

 

 

* * *

 

 

You let out a sigh as you decide it’s time to once again meet up with an old friend.

Kankri is doing a lot better now, he’s talking and moving, well, only around you, but it’s definitely an improvement. You have left him in Jake’s care while you go, seen as Jake is the only one you trust around here anymore and he’s on his lunch break.

Your phone buzzes in your pocket as you walk slowly down the corridor. You slow to a stop as you pull it out of your lab coat pocket and flip open the top.

Just Janie letting you know Mutie is home and safe and hasn’t tried to run off again. She even added one of her little smiley faces at the end with the little buck teeth. What a cutie.

As you walk, you think about Karkat and the note you left him.

He doesn’t have much of a chance with just him and Dave alone, but you are developing a plan to help them both, a distraction of sorts. You need  to finalise the details and figure out the best way to execute your brilliant plan.

You also need to keep Kankri safe throughout the whole ordeal. Not only is your “distraction” going to be incredibly dangerous and completely out of your control, but there will be about a hundred men with guns running around. Little Kankri is pretty much bullet-proof, but shoot him in the right place and he’s deactivated or damaged permanently.

Also, with Karkat and… your “distraction” running around, it will be highly likely your higher ups will suspect Kankri be at risk of malfunctioning and deactivate him or whatever else it is they do with the broken robots.

You sigh as you feel a lump of dread settle in to your stomach. This is in no way going to be easy.

You approach a door with a large metal sign nailed to its front reading: “ _strictly no unauthorised entry, instant dismissal to any unauthorised personnel_ ”. You are indeed, unauthorised personnel. You do, however, have incredibly good hacking skills and hacked the system, allowing you instant access to any door in the building through your key card. This door, will unlock, and lock behind you, and play a one minute loop of previously recorded security footage on the monitors the guards watch, and will continuously play that loop until you unlock the door again.

Dayum you are good.

You hesitate a moment before swiping your key card.

The lock beeps twice and a loud click alerts you that the door is unlocked. You step into the dark corridor inside.

There is no lighting in here, and truth be told, you always get a little nervous when walking down here. The corridors walls, flor and roof is all made of thick concrete, allowing no light in.

You slowly walk through before beginning to slowly edge yourself along, only your shitty phone light to guide you, until you reach the door at the end.

Very slowly, you reach out the key card and swipe it.

It beeps and clicks.

You open the door slowly into an unfortunately familiar room.

The loud sound of metal grinding against concrete and metallic screaming fills your ears.

‘Hello, old friend.’ You say quietly to the friend who can’t hear you.

Who won’t hear you.

 

‘It’s been a while, hasn’t it, Signless?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i havent updated in so long but i got so many comments since the last chapter and reading the comments just makes me so happy agh
> 
> also since the last chapter this fic has gained 50 kudos!?!?!?!?!??! 
> 
> asdfghjkl;lkjhgfdsafgb you people are wonderful i love you all
> 
> send me comments any time like srlsly i got so happy reading the last lot


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The breakout

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im not dead
> 
> long chapter this time over 3,500 words
> 
> sorry i had school shit and exams

_“Now, once you get out, you need to make sure you disable your tracking systems, it doesn’t have to be your function trackers, just your locator, okay? Make sure you do that after you get out because it’ll take less than a minute to put you on lockdown and bolt the doors. Then you need to get to the service elevator and go down the staircase, not the elevator, you hear me? Then, go down eight flights of stairs, make sure you count the landings with the doors, not the ones without, and open the door into that hallway. Once you get in there, make sure you’ve got no lights on, it’s a narrow hallway, so make sure no one is in there. You’ll get to the end and go through a door and down a set of metal stairs, make sure you’re quiet, they’re noisy when you step on them. Then you’ll see a couple of huge roller-doors, there’ll be a normal door beside them, it’ll be alarmed, but you don’t need to worry about that, I’ll have it covered. Once out there, you need to get out onto the street through the loading bay and get somewhere safe. Make sure Dave doesn’t bring his phone, or better yet, trash it. Or give it to me and I’ll dump it somewhere, okay? You got all that?”_

_“Yes, i am fairly certain i took all of that down.”_

_“Good.”_

_“What time is this again?”_

_“Eight thirty.”_

* * *

 

It is four thirty four in the morning and you are far too awake to even try to go back to sleep. You aren’t expected to be at Karkat’s for several hours. You have been lying awake for what feels like hours, but it’s probably only been about half an hour tops. You know that if you get up now you’ll get ready and just end up pacing up and down the apartment all day until it’s time to go.

You lie in bed just thinking about what you’ll have to do tonight until the digital clock next to your bed clicks over to five am.

You get up, deciding anymore attempts to sleep would be futile and slump yourself onto the couch in the living room, mentally punching yourself for not getting a better sleep than what few hours you got. You lay across the couch with your elbow resting on the armrest and your hand holding up your head, staring at some spot on the wall by the door. You take a few calming deep breaths through your nose before noticing the light starting to creep in under the curtains.

With another deep breath you stand and stumble across the room to the glass doors and push away the curtain. Its dark out but the sun appears to be rising somewhere behind the building and all the factory and advertisement lights have turned on for the day. You open the door and step outside onto the balcony, still wearing only your boxer shorts. But hey, no one can see you out here, that’s the only reason you come out here without your shades on too.

Thinking of it now, this is probably one of the only places you’ve gone outside without your shades on. You see, your eyes are bright red, which is clearly pretty fucking weird. So, you wear the shades so people don’t stare at you funny when you walk down the street, unless they’re staring at you because of how fucking cool you are because that’s totally fine.

You were born with this weird ass eye colour, you don’t know why but you just were. It might have been a genetic thing, you don’t know. Your parents didn’t stick around long enough for you to find out and you don’t remember the last time you saw your bro without his shades on. Rose has the same thing, the weird coloured eyes, just hers are purple. But she’s not too fussed about going around in public with her weird-ass eyes in full view. “contact lenses are popular these days” she says, “people will just think I’m wearing those” she says, “it’s not that weird a fucking colour Dave” she says. Easy for her to say.

You lean on the banister and take a deep breath of the city air. Gross, but refreshing.

You stare out onto the city – well, what you can see of it with your shitty view – for a while and take some time to relax before you decide it’s too cold out and you head back inside to find that it’s almost eight o’clock.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It is three minutes past eight o’clock in the morning and Dave still isn’t here. You have never been more fake-robot-nervous in your short life. It has to be now, so that it’s dark outside, and you’ll have more time to get away, and because you can’t contact Roxy right now, and she says her distraction is a one-time thing. Once it’s happened, it can’t happen again.

_“There’s gonna be people runnin’ round with guns, so watch out.”_

You still have no clue as to what sort of plan she’s got but it can’t be anything good.

Five minutes past eight and he still isn’t here. You want to tear out your shitty artificial hair.

Eight past eight and the door opens, Roxy is letting in Dave. She shoots you a worried look from the door and closes it without a word.

‘You’re late.’ You say as accusingly as your robotic voice will allow, even though he isn’t late quite just yet.

‘Sorry dude, was talking to my pal Roxy.’

‘I see. And what exactly were you talking about?’

‘Stuff that’s none of your damn business.’ He throws you with a smirk and you know he’s joking, but you shoot him a sceptical look anyway, just for good measure.

‘So how’s it hanging?’ he asks, and you know he’s just trying to kill time before Roxy’s “signal” makes itself known.

You two throw meaningless small talk back and forth for what seems like four hours, but when you check the time again, it’s only been twenty minutes.

‘It’s twenty-five past’ you say, staring blankly at the other end of the room.

‘S’getting late.’ Dave replies, stretching both arms high above his head. ‘Almost time for my favourite show to start.’ You aren’t sure whether he was dropping a hint and trying to tell you it was almost time to go, or if his favourite show actually does start soon. Dave spends a few minutes talking very dramatically about some shitty show he watches on TV when he is so rudely interrupted.

‘-and then they just flew into the room all ninja like _whooooooooa_ and then-’

A loud siren started going off.

‘An alarm? What the fuck-’

‘Time to go!’ Dave interrupts you and grabs your wrist, pulling you along behind him and quickly pulling his bag strap over one shoulder.

You run to the door, and just as you close it behind you, it makes a loud clicking noise that you assume to be the bolt. You remember what Roxy told you about your tracking systems and stop for a moment and place your hands to your head to concentrate. It only takes you about a minute to make sure you’ve disabled your tracking system.

‘Where to?’ Dave asks

‘Service elevator, follow me’ you run down the hall you assume Dave has walked through many times until you get to the main elevator and make a left turn. You run down the hallway until all the lights suddenly shut off.

‘What the fuck?’ Dave half whispers.

‘C’mon, let’s keep moving.’ You say, tugging on the sleeve of his shirt until you start to continue down the hallway at a cautious walk. You slow as you hear a loud noise coming from upstairs, but you can’t quite place what it is. Suddenly, the room shakes as a massively loud _boom_ erupts from above you. You grab Dave’s sleeve again and keep moving. After turning on your night vision feature, (which Roxy neglected to tell you about until recently) and leading Dave through the hallway to the service elevator. You find the door that leads to the stairs and throw it open, which proves to be quite a big mistake when it makes a loud creaking noise which you can see Dave cringe at.

A dull light shines through the door, enabling you to see the stairs without your night vision, which is good, because if you had to guide Dave down the stairs it would take forever.

‘What are you waiting for man? Let’s go!’ Dave shoves you through the door and you both begin your descent. One, two three… six, seven, eight flights of stairs, this is the door.

You open the door and quickly walk through into the narrow hallway Roxy had described. You make your way through it. The hallway opens up into a large, apparently empty room, apart from a few stacks of boxes in the corner. You walk around in there for a moment, realising there are two doors. One has a window so you walk over to peek through it. Dave follows closely behind, trying to see too. All you can make out of it is it appears to be some kind of store room. Not the door you are looking for.

‘Should we just go through the other-’

‘Shh’ Dave interrupts. A few muffled thumping sounds come from one of the floors above you. As you listen more carefully, you almost think you can make out the sound of gunfire.

‘C’mon, we should go.’ Dave says, reaching for your arm again.

‘Yeah, that’s prob-’ you are cut off by the ceiling collapsing in and a massive shape drops down in the darkness in front of you. Your night vision drops out as you are startled, but not before you see at least one person get crushed by it. It starts to move and your level of panic skyrockets. Whatever it is, is appears to be trying to stand up as machine gun fire starts ripping into it.

The thing is massive and stands almost with its head touching the hole in the ceiling, and it is a pretty high ceiling at that. It lets out a loud, monstrous roar and you find Dave holding his ears. It turns to look at the two of you and you decide to grab Dave and make a run for it.it reaches for you at an amazing speed and the two of you only just manage to miss being caught by it. You throw the door open and shove Dave through. You hear a sharp whistle and the thing stops and turns towards where the sound came from, which gives you the chance to leap through the door and close it behind you without that thing trying to crush you.

‘Holy fucking shit.’ You hear Dave say, voice held low. ‘C’mon, not far now, let’s go.’

You flick the lock across on the door and the two of you creep down the stairs, despite the noise in the room behind you, you still feel the need to keep as quiet as possible.

You slowly manage to get to the bottom of the spiral staircase and onto the loading dock floor.

‘The door.’ You say, pointing at the small metal door, right beside the massive roller doors, just like Roxy said. Dave moves ahead of you and drops down into the loading bay and heads towards the door

He tugged on the handle a few times before looking back at you.

‘It’s locked.’ He says.

‘No that can’t be right,’ you say, ‘Roxy said she’d take care of it. It should be open.’

‘Well it’s not’ he says, starting to sound frustrated.

‘What do we do?’ you ask, starting to panic again.

‘I don’t know, but we gotta get out before that thing gets in here!’

‘Uh, maybe the roller door?’ you suggest nervously.

‘How are we gonna open it, there’s no electricity and it’s way too heavy to lift, besides, it’s probably locked.’

‘Let me see it.’ You drop down into the loading bay and walk over to the side of the door with all the wires coming out of it. You look around there for a bit before looking at the lock. It’s a massive bolt, but you think if you could tear it off, you may be able to pull the bolt out of place. You try to pull on the locks metal casing and Dave tells you it’s no use just before you pull the damn thing off and tell him to go fuck himself. You quickly move onto the lock on the other side and when it’s off you try to pull the bolt out of place, which proves more difficult than tearing off the lock, though after a few minutes, you get it done.

‘If you’re gonna go to so much trouble to open the damn thing why don’t you just make a hole in the fucking door?’ Dave asks, still trying to get the other door open.

‘Too noisy. And plus, it’d be too difficult, I couldn’t just tear a hole in it I’d have to throw myself into it until the metal split. And besides, it’s made of an a lot stronger metal than your typical garage door and it’s a lot thicker too. Trust me, it’s much quicker this way.’

‘So what, you just gonna lift it?’

‘With your help, I do believe I can.’

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, I ain’t no fuckin robot, Vantas, I haven’t got any weird super strength like you.’

‘I don’t want you to lift it, dumbass, just pull down on the chain while I lift, it’ll be attached to a pulley somewhere and it’ll make it a lot easier to lift.’

‘Ok.’ He says going over to the chain at the side of the door. ‘What the fuck is a pulley’ you hear him mutter as he takes one part of the chain in both hands.

‘Okay, you ready?’ you ask as you crouch down and try to grab the bottom of the door the best you can.

‘I was born ready, Vantas.’

‘Okay, one, two three, Pull!’

You pull up on the door with all your strength and you see Dave leaning back and pulling on the chain with all his, but to no avail. The door doesn’t budge. You are about to ask if he’s sure he grabbed the right chain when he slips and the door shudders slightly.

‘Ha, we almost got it, Strider.’ You say, your robotic voice straining.

You gather up all the power you can manage, even dipping in to your reserve supplies and keep trying to lift the door. To your sheer joy, it starts to lift. You get it a few inches above the concrete ground.

‘Almost there, don’t stop now!’ you call to Dave. Once you’ve got it to around half your height, you decide it’s enough to hold while Dave gets through.

‘Alright, drop it, you can come through now.’

But the second Dave releases the chain, you nearly drop the door back to where it started.

‘Fuck!’ you both say, almost simultaneously. Dave makes a mad scramble back for the chain and starts pulling on it again, just before you almost drop it.

‘What are we gonna do now?!’ he half yells.

‘I don’t know! I’ll hold myself under it and you run through, ill drop it once you’re through and we’ll both get out.’

‘Dude, that’s crazy! You can barely hold the thing up!’ you reposition yourself so that your back and shoulders are taking most of the weight of the door and you are directly underneath it.

‘Just do it Strider!’

‘No, I’ll get something else-’

‘There’s nothing else in here!’ you hear someone bashing on the door at the top of the staircase. ‘WE DON’T HAVE TIME DO IT NOW!’

With a loud and frustrated groan, Dave let go of the rope and ran for the gap in the door. He dived under it and turned back to you.

You can’t move.

‘Hurry the fuck up!’ he hisses.

‘Dave I’m stuck.’

He falls silent for a moment.

‘What do you mean you’re stuck?!’

‘I can’t move.’ The way you positioned yourself with one knee on the ground and the other to your chest has left you pinned to the spot with all the weight on your back. You can feel your power draining, and very soon you’ll lose the ability to hold it up and it will crush you.

‘Just, I don’t know, roll to the side! Just hurry up!’ Dave cried, now sounding very distressed.

‘I can’t.’

You hear the sound of a gun being fired and the door at the top of the stairs flew open. You can hear yelling, but you don’t process what is being said. All you know is Dave has panicked and it trying to lift the door, to no avail.

Next thing you know, he’s grabbed you by your own hair and torn you straight out from underneath the door and you hear it hit the ground heavily as you roll across the loading zone.

‘Ughh’ you moan as you try to lift yourself up, but find yourself lacking the strength. Dave grabs you and holds you up the best he can as he starts to run away.

You try to keep up with him but mostly just find yourself being dragged across the ground.

He pulls you out of the loading dock, through an alleyway and into a street. It’s a very busy street and there are so many cars, but luckily nobody on the sidewalk for now.  You find it hard to believe that there must be at least one human in each of those cars. There are so many humans in the world and you knew that, eight point five billion people spread out across the globe, but it never really hit you, the reality of it all.

Dave drags you along the street, running as fast as he can with you in tow  and you slowly regain your ability to run. Come to think of it, you’ve never really run before. You hear yelling behind you and Dave’s pace speeds up. The two of you make a sudden sharp turn into an alleyway and run down it. The alley is full of dumpsters and a lot of gross things everywhere. Human garbage disposal is weird and disgusting, you decide. Then suddenly, Dave throws the two of you in the gap between two of the large dumpsters and behind some huge black garbage bags.

Ew.

But you guess you shouldn’t be worrying about that now, considering your life is at stake here and Dave is at risk of being in a _lot_ of trouble. Like, he’s looking at prison here. You think, that was where bad people went wasn’t it?

You landed next to Dave but he grabbed you so you were practically sitting on him, holding your head to his chest and trying to shrink down beneath the garbage bags.

You hear voices, but thankfully the sound of machine guns have stopped.

You hear a pair of feet through the sounds of nearby traffic, slowly making their way towards you. Dave holds you a bit tighter and you can feel his chest moving up and down as be breathes quickly, though you barely hear him.

A figure approaches and you see the human for a split second before Dave has pulled you to the side a bit so you can literally see nothing but the shitty record print on his shirt.

The footsteps suddenly stop. Shit, he must have seen you FUCK.

Dave’s breathing quickens as you hear the guy load some kind of small gun.

You are filled with sheer panic, if you had a heart, like a real human heart, you are sure it would be “racing” by now.

The footsteps start up again, but slowly get quieter. As it starts to sound as if he is quite a while away, you hear a loud flapping sound as something flies away. A bird maybe? You’ve never seen a bird before, so you wouldn’t know.

The human lets out a sigh and quickly walks down and out of the alleyway.

A few minutes pass and you suddenly become very aware of how close Dave is right now. You don’t know why, but it’s making you nervous. You don’t move though.

Half an hour passes and you are still there, Dave is breathing heavily with his forehead pressed into your hair and still clutching your head to his chest.

 

 

* * *

 

 

‘WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?’ you yell, feigning confusion and outrage.

‘Just stay away Miss!’ a security guard yells to you as he runs down the hallway.

Your distraction went _perfectly_ and now the whole building is in a panic. You managed to get there and get back before anything was destroyed or any alarms went off. Hella boss, that’s what you are, hella fucking boss.

Now you stand in the doorway of Kankri’s little apartment with the little guy pressed to your side. The poor thing is still shaking, you feel bad for that, but not much you can do about it now apart from staying with him. You just hope the boys got out okay.

Your phone starts ringing and you check the caller ID before flipping it open and answering.

‘Yo sup, can’t talk for long Janie I’m in lockdown.’

‘What? Lockdown? Why? Did something happen?’

‘That’s classified information, Janie.’ Wow you have always wanted to say that. ‘I’ll call you back later, but everything’s okay.’

‘Alright, just make sure you do! I’m a little worried!’

‘Don’t be, everything’s fine. Gotta go!’

‘Okay, goodbye!’

Dang, you just remembered you and Jane had dinner plans tonight. Wow nice scheduling Rox, couldn’t have planned the whole massive breakout for tomorrow night, could you? Nice going.

And you were going for pizza too.


	14. Where to go now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they busted out and dave is lost without his phone.
> 
> ah, technology.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> asdfhsdgak dear people leaving comments  
> you are the best okay  
> i jsut asdfshdfsgh  
> i was having a really bad day a few days ago and then just before i went to bed i checked the comments and just reading them made me so happy and now theres more and guhfugghf
> 
> even if i dont reply to your comment, i still read them all, and i still have some stupid-lookin' smile on my face when i do
> 
> it just really makes my day and thank you
> 
> *rant over*

You don’t feel the cold night air, but it sure doesn’t agree with your joints.

The cold seems to make them stiff, and harder to move. You never knew this would be a problem, but that’s probably because prior to this, you’ve always been in an area with a controlled temperature.

Dave had a sort of cloak hidden away in an old box on one of the side streets prepared for you so you could sneak through the city, hopefully undetected. Or at least, the general public might not notice you.

‘Dave’ you say, as loud as your voice will allow you in the freezing night, which is not very loud at all.

‘Hm?’ he says, turning to look at you as the two of you slowly make you way down the street.

‘W-where are we going?’ Dave turns to give you a worried look.

‘Are you okay man? Not still hurt from before are you?’

‘N-no.’ you try your very best not to stutter, and fail. ‘I-I think it’s too cold.’

‘Dude, you’re a robot, how can you be affected by the cold?’ He asks, lowering his voice. You shoot him the best glare you can manage.

‘Just answer my fucking question.’

‘Well…’

‘Well?’

‘Well, I was hoping to call a friend of mine and see if we could stay at her place.’

‘You were HOPING to? So you have no actual concrete plan here, you’re just pulling it out of your ass as you go along?’ you almost yell, now getting very frustrated.

‘Well, I thought Roxy was gonna organise it, but then apparently she wasn’t, and she took my phone so I can’t just message her. And dude keep your fucking voice down, in case you didn’t know, normal people aren’t used to someone speaking as if they swallowed a fucking dubstep CD.’ You shoot him a glare as cold as the night around you.

‘Well how are you going to contact this friend then? I didn’t even know you had a fucking friend.’

‘A have a whole bunch of friends, Vantas. We just need to get to a payphone and see if she can come pick us up.’

He has a whole bunch of friends? Like how many? How many friends can humans even have? You feel a pang of jealousy rising within you as you think of how many times he must have been with his other friends while he was talking to you over Pesterchum. You don’t know why though, you guess he can hang out with other friends. You probably won’t like them though. This “friend” who’s place you’re going to stay at will probably be your least favourite of all of his friends.

The two of you slowly make your way through the still semi-busy town, even though it is close to midnight, in search of a “pay phone.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

You think he’s pissed at you but hey. Not much you can do about it right now.

You make your way through the streets as fast as possible without arousing suspicion, which is not very fast at all. When you spot the nearest payphone, you quickly steer the two of you in its direction. You search your pocket for some change and insert it into the machine. You punch in Rose’s number and silently pray that you remember it correctly.

When a very sleepy voice answers the phone you recognise it as Rose.

‘Hello?’

‘Sup Rose, it’s me.’

‘Dave? What on earth are you doing calling at this hour?’

‘Rose it’s only like, twelve.’

‘Eleven forty five and I was sleeping.’

‘Early night then eh?’ you snicker.

‘Dave, what do you want?’

‘Okay, well, I need to ask you a massive favour.’

‘Do you now?’

‘I need you to come and pick me up from the city.’

‘Why?’

‘Just because I do.’

‘Dave I can’t drive.’

‘Yes you can.’

‘Not legally.’

‘Roooooooooooooooose, this is like super fucking important and I’ll explain when you get here but pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?’

‘Ugh, you owe me big-time, Strider.’

‘Yay! Thank you Rose!’

‘Where are you?’

‘City centre.’

‘I’ll pick you up from Amberland street, on the corner.’

‘Okay thanks Rose- wait, Amberland street isn’t that-’

‘Goodbye Dave.’

‘Rose wait-’

The phone begins beeping at you as Rose hangs up.

‘Fucking great.’ You mutter, now incredibly pissed off.

‘What is it?’ Karkat asks from behind you.

‘She just organised to pick us up from halfway across fucking town.’

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

You drag yourself out of bed and quickly undress as you stumble over your own pants in an effort to get to your wardrobe. You take out a skirt and top and quickly pull them on. The skirt is plain white and touches the top of your knees and your shirt is white with a purple squiddle on it. You pull of a pair of socks and shoes and quickly leave the house, dressed as though you were a much younger version of yourself.

You are in somewhat of a hurry and did not have time to pick something nice to wear.

You get in the car and use your rear view mirror to fix your hair up and add a headband before starting up the car and driving off.

You start to wish you had made a cup of coffee before you left as you still felt considerably drowsy and you do not like driving whilst being placed under certain risks. Like driving in bad weather conditions, or driving at night while tired. Some would say you’re being paranoid, but common sense would tell you you’re being reasonable.   
It’s a long drive to the city, so you decide to turn on the car radio to pass the time. A few songs play before a reporter begins a late night update.

“ _…even though, the mayor had previously stated otherwise. Tonight there was some panic raised in the central city area. All the lights in Crocker Corp.’s home branch were shut off earlier tonight, quickly followed by what appeared to be some kind of explosion. Alarms were sounded and the building went into lockdown. Crocker Corp.’s CEO released a statement earlier this evening saying that the building went under an emergency rehearsal. No damage was caused to the building or its surroundings and no one was injured in the process. Tonight it is around sixty degrees and tomorrow’s weather is looking to be sunny and…_ ”

Crocker Corp. stirring up trouble again.

You nearly curse the “Batterwitch” out loud, before realising just how much John’s antics must have gotten to you. You make a mental note to berate him for that at a later date.

Speaking of John, you haven’t spoken to him in quite a while now. Last you’d heard from him he was off to New York with his dad for two weeks and hasn’t spoken to you since. He’s probably just worn out from all the excitement, you know how he gets. Come to think of it, Dave hasn’t spoken to you much lately either. Perhaps he has been too busy concocting his “sick rhymes” for the past week or so. You haven’t heard from Jade a lot recently either, but that’s nothing unusual there. The girl is always off exploring somewhere. Though you do remember her saying once that a sensible person would carry at least six computers on them at any time, so you don’t really see the whole “off exploring” scenario as a valid excuse.

And now thinking of your lack of interaction with your only three friends, you haven’t really been socialising at all for the last week at least. Perhaps you need some new friends. Or a roommate at least. If only your sister would stop her sulking and come home, even for just a little while.

You really do wish she’d come home.

Ever since your ridiculous fight, she’s been avoiding you as much as possible.

You try not to think about it as much as you can and just concentrate on the road, and the song now playing through your speakers.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Fear. You know what it means and it means this.

Fear. Scared. That is what you are, scared.

Noises, loud, loud noises were here, so loud, made you stop hearing for some time. Floor shaking, walls echoing more noise. Fear, scared, noise, nowhere was safe, nowhere is safe now. Roxy is safe, but Roxy is also angry. You cling to her leg for safety, but keep quiet for fear. Shaking, the room is shaking, Roxy is shaking, no, everything is still, it is you that is shaking.

Door is closed, Roxy is moving. You trip and almost fall, but still hold to her tight.

She stops in the middle of the room and pulls you off her leg. You make a sad noise and she grabs you by the shoulders.

Speaking, she is speaking to you.

‘I’m sorry Kankri. You’re safe now, the danger is gone, I promise.’

She’s not mad and the danger is gone but there is still fear, and you want to start screaming. You make a noise like you will start screaming, but Roxy’s hands are on your face and she is telling you to shoosh, trying to make you calm, to make you safe.

She holds you in her arms and you don’t scream or push her away like every time before.

Roxy means safe.

Within Roxy’s arms is the safest place in the world.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

You pull up on the street you arranged to meet Dave to see he is standing there as though he’s been there for a while and is looking quite cold.

You wind down your window and shoot him a gentle smile. You notice someone is standing a little way away from him and you watch them warily from the corner of your eye.

‘Evening, Strider, now what is it that would require me driving all the way out here in the middle of the night all on my lonesome, and disturbing my rest?’

‘Rose we’ve been waiting here for nearly a fucking hour, don’t you dare complain about your stupid beauty sleep. How the fuck did it take you so long? Did you drive halfway around the fucking continent?’ It is true, you may have taken a few detours, but it’ll teach him to disturb your sleep.

‘I don’t know what you are talking about, David, perhaps you should think before waking me next time.’ You hear him mutter “don’t fucking call me David” before you continue. ‘Now what is that that is so important that you couldn’t tell me over the phone?’

‘Well, me and my friend here are in need of a place to stay for a while.’

‘What’s wrong with your apartment?’

‘Well, uh, let’s just say we can’t go back there for a while.’

‘And why would that be?’

‘Rose can you quit it with the twenty fucking questions, this is serious, we need to get off the street and we’re freezing.’ You chuckle a little before continuing.

‘Dave I am only playing with you, you know you are welcome in my home anytime.’

‘Ohh sweet, thank you so much Rose.’ He signals to his friend to come closer. The friend has a hood over his head. Half leaning out the window, you protest as Dave is about to open the back door.

‘Hold it a moment, if I am to take a complete stranger into my home, I should at least be allowed to see his face before he gets in my car.’

The hooded boy, (you assume,) turns to look at Dave. Dave stares at him for a moment, deep in thought before speaking.

‘Go ahead.’ He says to the boy. The Boy steps closer to your open window and you look up at his still hooded face. You take a moment for your eyes to adjust to the lack of light under his hood before you can properly see his face. Your lips part slightly and your eyes widen. You do _not_ believe what you are seeing.

‘Get in the car. Both of you.’

As they both climb into the backseat and belt up, you look from one to another through the rear view mirror and almost mutter to them.

‘What sort of shit have you gotten yourself into now, Dave?’

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Enraged screaming echoes throughout your chamber.

That screaming is coming from you.

You only ever wanted to die.

Or to kill those who prevented you from doing so.


End file.
